The Trump – Barr – Giuliani Cabal

I suspect that centrists and those with liberal leanings are terrified by the prospect of a gridlocked Biden facing a Trump rematch in 2024. And yes, there will be gridlock on key Biden policy issues, but most of his appointments will sail through. Biden has been very reassuring to centrists in his selections. 

Shudders and quivers of fear are also associated with the appointment of uber-conservatives Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett to the US Supreme Court. Yes, the Court will shift to the right, emphasizing property rights over free expression, paying much more deference to religious preferences and leaving states with less accountability to the federal government. But give the new justices, particularly Ms Barrett, time. They are probably going to surprise us all. Whatever their personal beliefs and shortcomings might be, I do not envision a wholesale reversal of the Affordable Care Act or Roe vs Wade. There are already signs that these justices might rise above their partisan roots to do what’s right.

Assuming that the Democrats do not win both Georgia Senate runoffs, a reasonable assumption, the 2022 midterms will be most telling. Some of Biden’s seminal platforms, relating to healthcare, taxation increases for the rich, energy and environmental priorities and foreign policy/aid initiatives will face tough going. But Biden has a great deal of administrative discretion over federal lands, requirements in potential federal vendors and an ability to sign and act on treaties even though formal Senate ratification might not happen. His control over foreign policy reconfiguration is immense, and he also has control over the budget requests of virtually all federal agencies. The Trump Wall is dead, dead, dead. Immigration priorities will be dramatically different, and DACA children will find a way to live in the only homeland they have ever known… forever.

But I strongly believe that Donald Trump, thorn in everyone’s media side that he will endeavor to be, will never ever have a meaningful shot at being President again. Aside from his age and general health (he is obese and will have continuing and long-lasting impairment from his bout with COVID-19), his sulking behavior and unwillingness to accept defeat with even a modicum of grace may play well with his base, but it has seriously alienated those truly uncommitted independents and particularly the younger, rising generations. Without those voters, he doesn’t have a prayer of being reelected.

He has not remotely replicated the economic growth of either the Clinton or Obama administrations, a fact that has been buried in misleading and self-serving tweets, and the levels of climate change driven natural disasters have exploded during his term in office. He has failed to exert any meaningful control over an epidemic, incredibly evidenced when our infection and mortality rates are so much worse, proportionately, than any other comparable nation on earth. The voters will not forget. The divisiveness he personally championed ripped America apart. His vituperatives, his name-calling, blaming and failure to take responsibility – reflected in tweets that will live forever to haunt him – are actually repugnant to most Americans, right and left.

Citizen Trump may or may not be able to pardon himself (or resign at the last minute to allow Mike Pence to do the honors) from federal crimes, but he cannot escape federal civil fines and penalties or violations (including criminal) of state laws. Like New York that is going after him with a vengeance. His tax returns will be public knowledge, and the results of detailed investigations into his questionable business operations will be examined by experts and journalists alike as details spill out. Trump, and his entire family as they are enmeshed in those questionable business dealings, will be outed as they have never been outed before. The base, which skews older and is slowly dying off, may support him, but the rising replacement generations will not.

William Barr and Mike Pompeo may have better luck running for Senate seats in bright red states, but their Trump taint will be their scarlet letter for life. History will view them as only one small step above rabble rouser, Joseph McCarthy. Rudy Giuliani has relegated himself to a standing joke, losing all credibility in a flood of baseless conspiracy theories and dripping hair dye. 

Donald Trump is over. Done. He will linger for the immediate future as a media provocateur, but if the GOP wants to revive, they will soon see a need to split from this failed populist distraction and find new leadership. It would be easier for Democrats if the Republican Party fails to correct this misstep – out of fear of losing the base – but as the base fades in the cold bath of reality, the GOP cannot remain ostrich-like in a sea of change. Coal miners have not kept their jobs. Steelworkers still face foreign competition. The Rust Best got rustier. Farmers lost major foreign markets. The economic promises were just words. 

Finally, the notion that Wall Street and Big Business love Donald Trump, primarily because of his tax cuts and policy of deregulation, is beyond false. Those platforms have always been GOP basics, but Donald John Trump is hardly a Republican. His pre-pandemic deficits were soaring. His trade policies made too many multinational American corporate giants into pariahs to the rest of the world. His on-again, off-again tariff wars, rolling last minute sanctions, made conducting cross-border business a quagmire of unpredictability. And most of all, his basic “Art of the Deal” was to throw the “other side” off with bullying instability, a strategy that did not work in business (Trump is the bankruptcy king) and absolutely failed in global trade relations. Wall Street abhors instability, and Donald Trump views destabilization as his most powerful tool.

Biden may be too old to seek a second term, and there are plenty of GOP candidates already building national viability. I think Mike Pence has been severely damages as national candidate, but players like Marco Rubio and, particularly, Nikki Haley, are very likely to slide up that national ladder, most probably after the 2022 mid-terms. Trump will be a memory they will need to erase.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while we dodged an authoritarian bullet this time, perhaps we now know the kind of American president we can never afford to have again.

Three Critical Weeks Followed by Impossibility

Looking solely at the federal moratorium on evictions (issued by the Centers for Disease Control – CDC), for those who have benefitted, it expires on December 31st. Nobody expects the Trump administration to extend the deadline, and while there is an expectation of a Biden reprieve, that cannot happen, until at the earliest, January 20th when Biden is sworn in. Tenants earning less than $99 thousand whose livelihoods have been slammed by the pandemic had been able to sign an affidavit to that effect and use that in court to stay a pending eviction. They were off the hook for back rent… until the moratorium expired. State and local governments are the only likely source for an interim extension for those critical approximately three weeks (or more).

We also know that the Trump administration, accompanied by the GOP-dominated Senate (so far), has stopped trying to work out an acceptable follow-up stimulus bill with Congressional Democrats. There are an estimated almost 6.5 million Americans depending on that rent moratorium right now. So, without stimulus money to pay rent, in those early weeks in January, there will be no federal program to prevent those evictions from proceeding. Nothing has prevented landlords from filing evictions in the courts (and many such actions have in fact been filed) – they just could not effect an eviction during the moratorium – but in that relatively short span of time in January, you can bet that a number of those evictions will be implemented. 

There is also a trickle-down of pain on the other side of the ledger. Landlords who are not receiving rent face foreclosure from banks that may hold mortgages against their rental properties. But if these impaired tenants cannot pay any current rent, how will they negotiate with their landlords to pay back rent, which they deferred but are still obligated to pay? And many landlords are not big, well-capitalized companies. Many are small property owners who themselves have relied on rent for their livelihoods. If they lose their rentals to banks in foreclosure because tenants could not pay rent, why do they wind up holding the bag?

To GOP purists, the notion of a government’s imposing a moratorium on evictions, no matter the justification, is completely unacceptable. It is their worst fear. Socialism. Especially if tenants are somehow relieved of an obligation to pay that back rent, by fiat or by subsidy. They believe that the free markets must be left to adjust, even as many Americans have no place else to go… in the middle of winter.

“[Not to mention that the moratorium] hasn’t worked perfectly. One problem is that many tenants still don’t know that it exists. ‘It doesn’t help if the tenant doesn’t know and can’t raise it,’ says Caitlin Cedfeldt, an attorney with Legal Aid of Nebraska. ‘And we see that happen a lot.’ In some areas, even when tenants have filed the declaration, they’re still getting evicted. ‘One of the issues with the moratorium is that your protections under it varied depending on what zip code you lived in, and what courthouse you appeared in. Housing courts in some jurisdictions honored the moratorium, and the moment a tenant triggered their rights by presenting a declaration, the judge dismissed the case or froze the case, at that spot,’ says [Emily Benfer, professor at Wake Forest University School of Law and chair of the American Bar Association’s COVID-19 Committee on Eviction]… ‘And in others, the courts didn’t even acknowledge the CDC authority over them. And so this meant that only some tenants were able to really leverage the rights.’

“Biden can learn from what didn’t work to design a better solution, Benfer says. One piece of the solution should be more direct financial support, since the moratorium doesn’t provide any rental assistance. Low-income workers, less likely to have savings, have also been disproportionately hit economically. ‘The renter population was among the hardest hit from the economic recession and job and wage loss,’ she says. ‘The moratorium itself, while critical, is delaying the rent due. So renters across the country have been accruing, in some cases, months of back rent, and it will be impossible for them to repay that debt to the property owner. And we can’t expect the property owners to shoulder the heavy weight of the economic recession by requiring that they cover the lost rent.’

“But though the moratorium is imperfect, the situation will be worse without it. The declaration that the CDC requires tenants sign spells out clearly how disastrous for cash-strapped renters the January deadline will be: ‘I further understand that at the end of this temporary halt on evictions on December 31, 2020, my housing provider may require payment in full for all payments not made prior to and during the temporary halt and failure to pay may make me subject to eviction pursuant to state and local laws.’” FastCompany.com, November 25th.

Even assuming a rapid deployment of a safe and effective vaccine to enough willing recipients to instill herd immunity and a return to non-COVID-dominated times, the economy does not jump instantly back to pre-pandemic numbers. Lots of jobs and many businesses have simply disappeared, permanently. For those who borrowed or deferred rent, even if they somehow instantly got their old livelihoods back, how do they service this incurred debt. And for those who do not resume full employment or a fully restored business, where do they turn? 

Since the inception of the Great Recession (2008), the federal government literally bailed out the American automotive industry, but are they willing to do that against for more businesses on a vastly bigger scale? “The U.S. government’s $80.7 billion bailout of the auto industry lasted between December 2008 and December 2014. The U.S. Department of the Treasury used funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program. In the end, taxpayers lost $10.2 billion.

“The Big Three automakers asked Congress for help similar to the [too-big-to-fail] bank bailout. They warned that General Motors Company and Chrysler LLC faced bankruptcy and the loss of 1 million jobs. The Ford Motor Company didn't need the funds since it had already cut costs. But it asked to be included so it wouldn't suffer by competing with companies who already had government subsidies.” TheBalance.com, updated June 29th. 

But since this pandemic economic collapse more closely resembles the devastation of the Great Depression of the 1930s, the economy just might require a massive restoration program like FDR’s New Deal, which seemed to work. And if we cannot figure out how to re-prime the pump, whatever recovery does begin may well take more than a decade to take root. For those who had no issue incurring a massive deficit to fund a tax cut for the rich in 2017 (and following), they are screaming that no more deficits are possible, that our economy cannot tolerate that cost. But since we are tracking in a globally impaired world, even though we were considerably more inept in dealing with COVID-19, the dollar should easily withstand that relative cost. And just remember, stock prices no longer reflect the greater economic good… for most of us.

I’m Peter Dekom, but if the federal government is unwilling to step up to the plate to do what must be done, prepare for a very long and miserable recovery.

Stupid People and Cold Cow Science

“Pfizer and others [pharmas] even decided to not assess the results of their vaccine, in other words, not come out with a vaccine, until just after the election…That’s because of what I did with favored nations and these other elements. Instead of their original plan to assess the data in October. So they were going to come out in October, but they decided to delay it because of what I’m doing, which is fine with me because frankly this is just a very big thing.” 

Donald Trump, November 21st

It is truly difficult to convince anyone whose passionate beliefs are based on unprovable assumptions of anything that might contradict those beliefs. For a substantial portion of human experience, the world was flat, and disease was caused by demons. Suggest anything to the contrary, and you were declared a heretic, facing shunning, banishment, ridicule or worse, torture and death. Ah mythology persists. The pandemic is real and growing. The unfortunate reality is the COVID-19 is passed from human to human primarily in aerosol form. While surface contact poses its own risk – generally resulting from touching a contaminated surface and then touching one’s face – the bulk of transmission for this virus is airborne. 

It absolutely does not matter to nature – which appears to be addressing our overpopulation issue by finding new ways to cull the human herd – whether you believe in the toxicity risk of the novel corona virus or not. The mythology of “non-threat except to the economy” is further sustained by the vastly differing levels of human susceptibility to the infection; some get it and join the 255,000+ to die, while others manifest virtually no symptoms at all. But what is particularly strange is that so many people who have lost friends and family to this infectious agent but who did not previously believe SARS-cov-2 (the formal name for the virus) was a serious threat to life and limb do not change their minds about the threat.

Aside from the usual tax and regulatory averse fat-cat Republicans, Donald Trump has struck a nerve with a large populist group that is increasingly feeling left behind in a world changing into something they cannot or will not accept. Well before the pandemic, they were losing their jobs, mostly to obsolescent skills, online retail, or dwindling demand in the product/services range in which they have been working. The genuine “why” this is happening is less important than their perception that there must be others to blame and that these exclusionary forces can be stopped and even reversed. Not exactly how change has ever worked. If only…

Unscrupulous politicians, more interested in enhancing the economy for the richest in the land, have learned that if they blame enough, promise enough – regardless of the truth behind the words – they can cater to people who are sliding into that most dangerous category (towards nothing left to lose) and generate power, passion and mythical beliefs that allow them to explain these politicians’ consistent failure to deliver on their pledges under a fabricated blame game. For example, they can promise social conservatives, slowly fading in a sea of diversity, that their religiosity can be imposed as law on a majority of Americans who have long since rejected that cornerstone of that vote: right to life vs right to choose.

Given that there is absolutely zero doubt today, based on a whole lot of data that we did not have at the inception of this pandemic, that masks save lives and prevent the spread of COVID-19, wearing a mask still is imbued with the notion of government interference that so many Republicans cannot fathom. They have even fabricated a notion of a fundamental constitutional right – without the slightest judicial support for that position – that they cannot be required to take medical precautions to protect other Americans… by simply wearing a mask. If that doesn’t change, along with an antivax movement that threatens the efficacy of a vaccine-driven path to herd immunity, we are in for a very long attempted recovery and an economic slam which can only build on the damage already done. But there is a path, and it involves modern marketing techniques, that just might work.

“Lisa Feldman Barrett, a distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University, the chief science officer of the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior at Harvard University, and now the author of Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, agrees. She speculates a solution on a grand scale: We need the most highly coordinated influencer campaign in history to stop COVID-19 in its tracks…

“‘What happens when you have a social reality that is in direct opposition to physical reality? ‘I’m not going to wear a mask because I’m an individual and I have rights. I can make my own decisions, and this is a plot by the government,' ’ says Barrett. ‘That’s a social reality that’s ignoring physical reality, in the sense that it doesn’t matter if you believe a virus is a plot or not, because if the virus is there it’s very real. All the virus cares about is you have a nice, wet set of lungs.’… So what can we do to fix social realities?

“We know where these misbeliefs come from because scientists understand how we learn: from the people around us, through both language and mimicking behavior. But we don’t value what everyone says equally. We model people who we admire—our parents, political figures, and celebrities. Prestige makes a difference.

“‘Especially credible or unlikely messengers are powerful. That’s why it’s really important to have more Republican governors [who were previously] skeptical about public health measures, speaking out [in support], says [Brendan J. Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College]. ‘And why it’s really dangerous, conversely, to see a lot of the Fox News opinion machinery turning public health measures into identity politics. It’s not that there’s a risk to public health and that thousands of people are going to die in the coming weeks and months, but that it’s a ‘war on Thanksgiving.' ’…

“Can some updated messaging change hearts and minds this deep into the pandemic? Evidence suggests, yes… In 2016, Princeton researcher Elizabeth Paluck led a study across 56 middle schools in New Jersey that had significant issues with bullying. Her team was able to reduce conflicts by an incredible 30% within a year. How? They didn’t try to change everyone’s minds about bullying. Instead, they targeted the tastemakers, the popular or influential students in the schools, and encouraged them to post about the dangers of bullying on Instagram, wear bracelets for the cause, and speak to other students about better means of conflict resolution.

“Leveraging a handful of influencers—the people we model to learn and create social realities—researchers were able to quantifiably reduce bullying across dozens of schools… Barrett cites this research and believes that America needs to duplicate it, albeit on a much larger scale, to get people to believe in the dangers of COVID-19, wear masks, and actually take the vaccine when it’s available so that we can put this pandemic behind us. But picking out a few popular kids in a high school is easy. How do you do that on the scale of America itself?

“‘We have brilliant marketers in this country. Imagine what would happen if you had the people who market things for Apple, or the products we feel like we can’t do without, and you put them on the job to come up with campaigns to give to the influencers who are widespread?’ muses Barrett. ‘Could that turn the tide against the naysayers?’ 

“We’d need politicians. Celebrities. Micro-influencers. And, yes, members of the conservative-leaning media. Barrett imagines a coordinated movement, with a simple, unified message, in which all of these different power brokers actually demonstrate themselves social distancing, wearing a mask, and taking a vaccine.” FastCompany.com, November 21st.

“We also have other, logistical problems in getting vaccines, some of which require really cold temperatures, into tens of thousands of inoculation centers to vaccinate millions of Americans. Cows just might have given us the solution. “On [November 16th], the pharmaceutical company Pfizer announced early data that showed a vaccine it has been developing in partnership with the German drug manufacturer BioNTech was more than 90 percent effective in preventing covid-19. This level of efficacy amazed researchers, including those at my own institution, Yale School of Medicine, who agreed that if the data holds (it has not yet been peer reviewed), then this vaccine would be poised to dramatically curtail the impact of the virus.

“This news made headlines, along with Joe Biden’s and Kamala D. Harris’s rollout of a covid-19 task force composed of biomedical experts, suggesting even as the number of daily new infections reached an all-time high in the U.S., a cure was in sight. But, storing and distributing a vaccine — especially the potential Pfizer vaccine, which must be frozen until use at -70°C, around the temperature of dry ice — poses a significant challenge.

“Rural cattle breeders offer a solution. In the 1950s, during the Cold War, they played a major role in developing and scaling up the technology to circulate biological materials globally at temperatures as low as -196°C, that of liquid nitrogen. In what is known as the ‘cold chain,’ these supply networks made it possible to ship temperature-sensitive agricultural and medical products within and beyond the United States.

“In the age of covid-19, the history of cattle breeding in the Midwest provides insights about the challenges and possibilities involved with the distribution of Pfizer’s potential vaccine, whether it ultimately uses liquid nitrogen or another mode of cold storage. In fact, how agricultural workers and engineers partnered with public health officials the world over at mid-century, during times of geopolitical strife, provides precisely the kind of unexpected object lessons necessary for surviving the present.” Joanna Radin, assistant professor of history of science and medicine at Yale, writing for the November 12th Yale News. Right there in the middle of red state America is a brilliant solution that benefits us all.

I’m Peter, Dekom, and if we can combine red and blue into red, white and blue, yes we can!

You Can Call Me Ray

People often feel strongly about a cause. They might see injustice, discrimination, government failures, malevolent actors “getting away with it,” or might simply be championing a cause. So they assemble and protest. Legal scholars will tell you that these are protestors exercising their constitutional rights under the First Amendment. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. The Fourteenth Amendment extends this restriction to state governments as well. These constitutional rights do not embrace arsonists, looters or vandals, by the way. 

For various political or historical reasons, the First Amendment has recently become among the most controversial provisions in our Constitution. Fake news and election-directed manipulation claim protection under its aegis. Lies themselves, they say, are constitutionally protected speech. Yet inciting to riot, crying “fire” in a crowded theater where there is no real threat and pornography showing children are all illegal. Twitter and Facebook have already taken to banning or restricting liberals-as-sex-traffickers conspiracy theory promoter Q-Anon in early October. By the end of the month, it seems as if Facebook’s ban is holding. The easy issues are at the most egregious and dangers extremes, where society itself, personal health and safety or vulnerable minorities are seriously at risk of violence. 

But what we are struggling with as a nation is when political incumbents, in charge of police and military power, strongly oppose movements (speech and assembly) that challenge their political perspective, their vision for America… and are willing to deploy that power to suppress contrary expression. It often starts with labels. “Radical” is one of those yellow flag words. So is creating a new label, one that conflates a philosophical concept as if it describes an actual organized body of assembled miscreants. “Antifa,” for example, does not exist as a group. Or applying excess force, as determined by subsequent judicial review, to provoke a violent response or generate footage showing tear gas, and crumbling protestors as proof of the need to suppress.

Are the BLM protesters, those angered at the number of Black Americans killed or maimed by police the huge issue we are told is the case? Officially, the President and the Department of Justice think so. Speaking at conservative Hillsdale College on September 16th, an increasingly rogue US attorney general, acting as if he were the President’s personal lawyer, William Barr pretty much justified a dramatically political agenda for the Department of Justice, with no pretense that violating that agency’s traditional neutrality was dramatically contrary to the DOJ mandate since it was created in 1789:

“Barr overruled a sentencing recommendation by prosecutors in the case against Roger Stone, a former adviser to President Donald Trump who was convicted for lying to Congress about his contacts with the Trump campaign regarding WikiLeaks… In a second case, the Department of Justice is seeking to drop charges against Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser charged with lying to the FBI about his communications with Russia’s ambassador.

“Barr also criticized the Black Lives Matter movement while saying he agrees that Black lives matter. The Washington Post covered those remarks—made in a Q&A session after his speech.

‘They’re not interested in Black lives. They’re interested in props, a small number of Blacks who are killed by police during conflicts with police—usually less than a dozen a year—who they can use as props to achieve a much broader political agenda,’ he said... Barr has urged aggressive prosecution of protesters who are violent, reportedly telling prosecutors in a call last week that they should consider charging them with sedition, according to previous accounts by the New York Times and other publications. Those stories were based on anonymous sources.” Journal of the American Bar Assn., September 17th. Really?

“Sadly, the trend of fatal police shootings in the United States seems to only be increasing, with a total 661 civilians having been shot, 123 of whom were Black, as of August 30, 2020. In 2018, there were 996 fatal police shootings, and in 2019 this figure increased to 1,004. Additionally, the rate of fatal police shootings among Black Americans was much higher than that for any other ethnicity, standing at 31 fatal shootings per million of the population as of August 2020.” Statista.com, August 30th. 

The FBI tells us that the greatest danger they see to society is domestic terrorism, mostly from right-wing white supremacist movements: “On Thursday [9-17], FBI Director Christopher Wray directly contradicted the White House’s anti-antifa messaging push while testifying in front of the House Homeland Security Committee. ‘It’s not a group or an organization. It’s a movement or an ideology,’ he said, explaining that ‘folks who subscribe or identify” with antifa do not operate at a national level, but instead organize ‘regionally into small groups or nodes.’ “When asked about the greatest domestic terrorism threats facing the U.S., Wray did not name antifa. Instead, he cited the kinds of violent extremists historically more likely to side with the president. ‘Within the domestic terrorism bucket, the category as a whole, racially motivated violent extremism is, I think, the biggest bucket within that larger group, within the racially motivated violent extremist bucket,’ said Wray. ‘People ascribing to some kind of white supremacist-type ideologies is certainly the biggest chunk of that.’ The bureau chief went on to note that, when it comes to extremist violence in the U.S., 2019 was the deadliest year since 1995, when white supremacist Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people by bombing a federal building in Oklahoma City.” Vanity Fair, September 17th. 

On June 1st, the President used DC police and members of the National Guard, deploying rubber bullets,tear and pepper gas, to subdue and disperse a group of totally peaceful protestors in order for him to have the above picture taken. “As he brandished an unopened Bible in front of the boarded-up St. John's Episcopal Church across the street from the White House Monday evening, President Donald Trump delivered an unspoken message to white evangelical Christians: Remember, I'm on your side.” CNN. June 3rd. The Constitution was an inconvenience simply to be ignored. AG William Barr and several uniformed military officers accompanied the President to that church (the church’s Bishop protested the event).

But the issue is the increasing use of federal forces – law enforcement and military (the latter, absent massive armed insurrection, is not permitted to be used against US civilians) – to champion the President’s political agenda and to crush those who oppose it via peaceful protests. New “non-lethal” weapons are being discussed as possible “additional force” to be used against protestors. One is called an Active Denial System (ADS), and it was almost used to clear the above peaceful protestors. “Now a new report shows that the military police had attempted to acquire another weapon from the National Guard to oppress protesters that night [6-1]: a heat ray [the ADS, pictured above]…

“A heat ray is a large antenna designed by the military that looks like an oversize DirecTV dish. It’s either mounted on a vehicle or can be deployed as a large stand-alone unit. It fires completely invisible electromagnetic waves that penetrate the skin 1/64 of an inch deep—the depth of your nerves—creating an intense burning sensation if you stand in its path instead of getting out of the way.

“It’s technically the same sort of technology behind your kitchen microwave, but operating at a much lower frequency (the heat ray runs at 95 Hz while the microwave runs at 2.45 GHz). That means the heat ray’s wavelengths are shorter and less able to penetrate an object and transfer energy the way your microwave does to heat your food… Notably, the heat ray has range: The electromagnetic beam can reach over half a mile and is unaffected by wind, though its exact range appears to be classified.” FastCompany.com, September 18th. Is this what the Constitution envisioned as the protection of individual rights? Obviously not. Can our democracy survive if this becomes standard operating procedure no matter which party is in power? Obviously not.

    I’m Peter Dekom, but while many in America believe our democracy is strong and unassailable, constitutional scholars and historians understand how fragile that form of government actually is.

Frustrating, Complicated and Maybe Untenable

Over 73 million Americans voted for Donald Trump, about 5.5 million fewer than Joe Biden. Biden is easily going to prevail over all of Donald Trump abortive attempts to wrest the election for himself. However, the future of all of the President-elect’s pledges very much relies on control of the US Senate. The two Georgia run-off seats (to be determined in January) are unlikely both to go to the Democrats, and if either seat is retained by the GOP, Biden’s legislative agenda is extremely unlikely to find traction. 

There are two major forces tilting against the Biden presidency that could render his tenure nothing more than gridlocked caretaker administration, if not worse. The first is the ultra-populist movement, backed in part by well-armed and very angry conspiracy theorists and trained militia, that has a significant groundswell of adherents very openly stating that unless or until Donald J Trump both (i) concedes that he lost the election and (ii) that it was a fair and honest determination, they will not recognize Joe Biden’s victory. What’s more, they are expressing a willingness to use arms if called upon to support Trump’s remaining in office.

The second force, rather obviously, is the necessity of getting legislations passed by both houses of Congress. The Democrats, while maintaining a slim majority, may control the House of Representatives, but without one victory in the Georgia US Senate race, the GOP will still have a one vote majority. If the Dems win both seats creating an even split, Vice President Kamala Harris (as “President of the Senate”) will have the power to break a tie. Otherwise…

An online discussion of political experts was hosted by Yale University’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS) on Nov. 17th, and the resulting analysis was anything but optimistic. “[The] Democratic Party will be unable to enact its legislative agenda on policing reform, healthcare, climate change, and other issues, said David Mayhew, [Yale University] Sterling Professor of Political Science Emeritus and one of the nation’s foremost experts on the U.S. Congress… ‘Biden’s got a tough presidency,’ Mayhew said. ‘It’s going to be an inbox management presidency like Harry Truman’s, not a legislative program presidency. It’s a very tough four years coming up.’

“Voters rendered a split verdict on the future of American democracy, delivering a clear rebuke to President Donald Trump while likely denying the Democratic Party full control of Congress, said Jacob Hacker, the [Yale] Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science.  .. ‘[Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell once again will be in the position of deciding what is possible for an incoming Democratic administration and will almost certainly say, as he did back under President Obama, that his top priority is to make the Democratic incumbent a one-term president,’ said Hacker, whose latest book, ‘Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality,’ analyzes the Republican Party’s use of populist appeals to rally voters behind what he describes as policies that favor the rich and powerful.

“Hacker argued that the Republican Party has insulated itself from electoral accountability by burrowing into the country’s anti-majoritarian political institutions, such as the Senate. Republican elected officials’ silence as Trump makes baseless claims of widespread voter fraud is deeply troubling, he added. .. ‘The base of the Republican Party is thoroughly Trumpian,’ he said. ‘The structures of organized outrage that have supported him remain in place.’

"Trump’s enduring popularity within the Republican Party offers a bleak picture of the state of American democracy, said Isabela Mares, the [Yale] Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science. The president’s ability to attract more than 70 million votes during the latest election despite the federal government’s ineffective response to the COVID-19 pandemic was puzzling, she said. His populist messages downplaying the virus and blaming China for its spread proved effective in maintaining his electoral coalition, Mares added…  ‘This suggests to me that we have not fully appreciated the power and strength of populist appeals,’ she said…  The willingness of Republican elected officials to countenance Trump’s violation of democratic norms is evidence of an eroding democracy, she suggested.   

“Mayhew was more optimistic about the health of democracy in the U.S. … ‘I think the election is a considerable victory for moderation and probably for coalition government of the American sort,’ he said, noting that voters rejected both Trump and the leftwing of the Democratic Party. ‘The fever is down.’… The election, Mayhew added, was smoothly conducted despite the challenge of executing it amid the pandemic. And, he said, Trump’s denial of the result will fail… I think the ‘democracy is dying’ script should be put back in the file cabinet.

“However, some of the tactics used by Trump could stick, said Christina Kinane, an assistant professor of political science and an expert on political appointments. His practice of installing acting directors to executive agencies to avoid the normal vetting process will provide a ‘playbook’ for Biden should a Republican-controlled Senate block his appointees, she said.” YaleNews, November 19th. 

Aside from the fact that the US Constitution is close to being two and a half centuries old – created in the time of muskets, flintlocks and sailing ships when the United States was 94% agricultural – there was this underlying assumption that those elected to Congress and the presidency would be men (yup, men) of high moral standing who would place their country’s interests above party or individual. There are lots of holes in democratic processes as defined in that esteemed, founding if not archaic document, one that today is virtually impossible to amend. That “men of honor” assumption obviously is no longer operative. If this nation does not find a way to get past the current democracy threats to a more compromise-based form of government (which has defined the US for most of its history – minus the Civil War), if the value of a unified nation is no longer perceived as relevant or desirable, this United States will end… and it will not end well.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I am deeply saddened by this dramatic political breakdown that is threatening to end one of the greatest nations on earth.