Using FEMA and Disaster Relief as a Political Weapon

 

It has happened in the past, even before Donald Trump was elected in 2016. Superstorm Sandy (above left) devastated blue New York and New Jersey in the fall of 2012, inflicting an estimated $70-$100 billion in damage, all told. Enough Republican members of Congress saw the vote for disaster relief as a way to send a clear message to blue states: we do not want to send you a dime. It took New Jersey GOP Governor Chris Christie to convince those state representatives to reverse course, noting how many GOP donors lived in those decimated states… Wall Street mavens with big conservative checkbooks. Still, GOP resistance mounted under the guise of containing budget deficits, notwithstanding earlier disaster relief bills passed with Democratic support for their own GOP-controlled states.

The $51 billion aid package passed, but “Among the 179 Republicans who voted ‘no’ are several lawmakers who were elected in 2010 in the Tea Party wave and who promised to rein in federal spending. There were also prominent committee chairmen, such as Dave Camp of the House Ways and Means Committee, Fred Upton of the Energy Committee and Jeb Hensarling of the Financial Services Committee, who were among the bill's opponents… Another ‘no’ vote: House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the GOP's 2012 vice presidential nominee.” USA Today, January 16, 2013. It could happen again, and the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that exempts the president from legal responsibility when there are colorable “official acts” involved; disaster relief weaponization may evolve into a presidential tool, regardless of party affiliation.

But it’s not just the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that has generated Republican wrath. To MAGA, news supporting the reality of climate change, and the disasters that experts prove are the results of that horrific global transition, is an anathema to climate change deniers. Simply, they view meteorologists even mentioning “climate change” in their forecasts as fabricators under the influence of deep state governmental agencies and research from elites seeking to crush GOP operatives and beliefs. Shut off mention of climate change, and the problem is solved. In May, Florida MAGA Governor Ron DeSantis even signed legislation that erases most references to climate change from state law. Go Ronnie! But wait, there’s more.

Last year, for example, Chris Gloninger – chief meteorologist for CBS affiliate KCCI-TV in Des Moines, Iowa – was lambasted after he persisted in linking climate change to regional weather-related disasters. He resigned after an 18-year career, saying he was “bidding farewell to TV to embark on a new journey dedicated to helping solve the climate crisis.” Why? He said a primary motivator was "a death threat stemming from my climate coverage last year and resulting PTSD…"

And where do local weathercasters get their underlying information? The federal government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), with global satellites and weather-directed aircraft feeding data into very sophisticated computer systems with remarkable accuracy. The November 3rd NBC News reported the obvious: “FEMA and NOAA … have become increasingly politicized in recent years despite the offices’ history of remaining above the fray. But with natural disasters fueled by climate change now regularly slamming the U.S. — this year has already seen 24 weather events that each caused at least $1 billion in damage — the agencies have taken on a greater role. And with it, they’ve become a target for some conservatives who are skeptical of climate change and want to slash government budgets.”

To MAGA elected representatives, including Trump during his presidency, federal disaster relief is a political decision, even when the culprit may just be the federal government itself. Under the guise of budgetary prudence, MAGA is perfectly willing to cut taxes for the wealthiest (which almost always results in a massive budget deficit), but stuff like “forest maintenance” on federal land, exclusively controlled by the US Department of Interior, is expendable. It’s easier to blame blue states and their forested lands for failing to fix their own neighboring forests.

But whether it comes from a presidential mandate or a MAGA-dominated Congress, we seem to live in an era where jurisdictions controlled by the opposition party, even where the tax dollars from those states exceed federal benefits received, face the political wrath of the party in power. As Alex Wigglesworth, writing for the November 2nd Los Angeles Times explains: “Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to cut off federal disaster aid for California’s wildfires if he returns to the White House, most recently at a campaign rally in [California’s Coachella Valley] and in remarks at his golf course in Rancho Palos Verdes.

“Such a loss of federal funds would be a devastating blow to a state where wildfires have grown larger and more destructive in part due to climate change. A single severe fire season can rack up tens of billions of dollars in damage, firefighting costs and economic losses. The prospect of losing disaster aid has state officials and politicians mulling contingency plans… ‘We’re going to take care of your water situation, force it down his throat, and we’ll say: Gavin [Newsom], if you don’t do it, we’re not giving any of that fire money that we send you all the time for all the fire, forest fires that you have,’ Trump said at [that Coachella mid-October] …

“The threats appear to be founded. Presidents have an extraordinary amount of discretion when it comes to disaster aid, which Trump reportedly wielded as a political cudgel during his presidency… He initially refused to approve federal aid to California for wildfires in 2018 [above right] until a National Security Council staffer showed him that Orange County had a dense concentration of supporters, according to a report from Politico’s E&E News. Trump also ignored a 2020 request for aid for Washington state fires amid a feud with Gov. Jay Inslee, with the funds greenlighted only when President Biden took office months later, the outlet reported.” But to be perfectly clear, the power to block FEMA and NOAA funding or to pare or refuse disaster relief can be forced by either the President or a reluctant Congress. And MAGA has often stated that it is not the party for all Americans, just their loyalists.

I’m Peter Dekom, and welcome to the dis-United States of America where helping your neighbor with a different party affiliation is increasingly “yesterday’s news,” a very, very un-Christian notion.

How Now, Red Cow?

 

How Now, Red Cow?

Be Careful what you wish for.

Did Donald Trump, based on the Electoral and popular vote, now controls or is about to control all three branches of the federal government (Executive, Legislative and Judicial). Does he get the absolute mandate, de facto autocracy, he wanted? Or will his efforts to impose Project 25 values, now acknowledged as the guiding platform, be so extreme as to create a backlash bigger than his mandate? Time will tell, but many of his announced policies will actually conflict with what his voters are willing to accept, even contradictory with their true priorities. Which are, according to exit polls? Daily cost of living reduction and tighter immigration policies. Although white working-class men feeling marginalized by DEI policies did resonate, most of his other culture policies were left in the wake of his reelection.

As Kamala Harris failed to distinguish herself from a very unpopular elderly President, and thus the blame for higher prices and immigration nightmares heaped on Biden (whether he could have done more to fix these is a question), the two major issues why Trump won. The icing on the victory cake also brought together two very conflicted constituencies to vote for Trump: pro-Israel Zionists, mostly older, aligned with Trump-fan Benjamin Netanyahu and those GenZ voters horrified at Biden’s unremitting supply of weapons that enabled Israel to pound Gaza into near oblivion. How Trump will handle this conflict is key, but Netanyahu may have an excuse for that ceasefire now.

However, that mandate among not-always-Trump voters did not embrace extremism. If democracy continues – and since got the control he wanted, he did not have to “terminate” the Constitution – Trump might actually be limited by a desire to enhance his historical legacy plus a possible backlash that could tank the MAGA right in the mid-terms and beyond. People want cheaper housing costs, lower daily cost of living realities in insurance food and fuel plus border control as their main objectives.

As David Lauter, writing for the November 9th Los Angeles Times notes, dealing with cost stabilization is easy, but Trump seems hellbent on screwing it up: “Preventing a new round of widespread price increases should be easy: Inflation is already largely under control after the rapid rise in costs of 2022 and early 2023, and interest rates are coming down. Doing nothing would basically get the job done… The problem is that Trump doesn’t want to do nothing. He wants to do several things — including imposing massive tariffs and enacting new individual and corporate tax cuts — that run a high inflationary risk… Immediately after the election, interest rates rose as bond investors began to price in the possibility of renewed inflation under Trump.”

If tariffs act as expected, de facto sales taxes on everyone fomenting retaliatory tariffs on US exports, the normal economic reaction is higher prices here and fewer opportunities to export. The notion that foreign governments will pay the US-imposed tariffs and fund everything is simply not how tariffs work. Importers pay those tariffs and generally pass those higher costs to consumers; many Trump supporters did not understand that. That American-made manufactures (like cars, aircraft, etc.) are rife foreign-made components further complicate this pledge. US consumers will pay more. A massive tax cut for the rich is on the table again. Trump’s tax cut in 2017 failed: where the incentive to “job creators” was more dividends, more merger/acquisition activity, but no increase in those “good jobs” touted, plus a few trillion-dollar hit to the deficit. The tax cut most certainly did not pay for itself. Neither will any further such cuts.

The other factor that I do not hear much about is the potential devastating consequence for the value of the US dollar from a possible international backlash against this US effort manipulate overall trade vectors. US economic bullying could ignite a global response that could result in a fade in the status of the US dollar as the primary global reserve currency (the currency metric which is used in most parts of the world for trade and valuation purposes) and increasing global efforts (already underfoot in Russia and China) to work around US financial standards (like SWIFT banking) with new replacement platforms. Such a result will make our ability to borrow to fund deficits increasingly difficult, reduce the value of the dollar and thus result in vastly higher costs and forced austerity for American consumers.

The other mechanism to pay for that tax cut includes offsetting massive federal budget cuts. And while that sounds popular, most Americans are wary of letting a near-trillionaire, Elon Musk, take his scissors to the discretionary part of the budget. We still owe interest on our deficit, which will not go away. If the tax cuts are not countered by massive reductions to the federal budget, inflation’s gnarled teeth will start chomping away as prices skyrocket. Do we really want reduced healthcare, the Affordable Care Act, Medicare and Social Security… cuts to education support?

Rational immigration policies are also a top-line item. Cruelty and budget-busting massive incarceration and deportation of all undocumented residents are not what most Americans really believe will happen. Indeed, pulling out a huge segment of low cost labor, particularly in agriculture and construction, will send food costs higher and prevent the construction of all those new residential projects needed to relieve the housing crisis. And no, that undocumented work force will not vacate desirable houses and apartments.

While deportation of some of these undocumented residents is high on the priority list, “That doesn’t mean, however, that they’d support [Trump advisor and extreme MAGA Stephen] Miller’s dreams [of complete deportation]. Voters’ views on immigration are often complicated. A separate question on [a] Pew survey found that 61% of voters — although only one-third of Trump supporters — said that undocumented immigrants should be able to ‘stay in the country legally, if certain requirements are met.’… Other surveys have found that support for deportation drops when pollsters ask about specific categories of immigrants who lack legal status, such as longtime residents, spouses of U.S. citizens and people brought to the U.S. illegally as children.” Lauter.

And then there are the policies that will alienate those independent voters who thought Trump exaggerated certain promises, but if he implements them… “There’s much less reason to think voters long to hand broad government authority over to Elon Musk or give Robert F. Kennedy Jr. control of federal health policy… On other topics, there’s strong evidence of what might be called an anti-mandate. Even in conservative states, for example, voters made clear that they oppose moves to restrict abortion. There’s very little [grassroots] support for rolling back LGBTQ+ rights, despite the wishes of some of Trump’s evangelical supporters... And there’s little public support for Trump to go on a revenge spree against his Democratic opponents.” Lauter. We’ll see.

I’m Peter Dekom, and there is a huge gap between what a candidate promises to deliver and the harsh reality that often laces those policies with a double-edged sword… and where “alternative facts” just do not work.

Did Democracy Die in Darkness?

Did Democracy Die in Darkness?

Is Mainstream Media No Longer the Message?

“If half the country has decided that Trump is qualified to be president, that means they’re not reading any of this [mainstream] media, and we’ve lost this audience completely… A Trump victory means mainstream media is dead in its current form. And the question is what does it look like after.” Anonymous Media Executive in NY Magazine.

“Their ability to set the narrative has been destroyed. Trump declared war on the media in 2016. Tonight he vanquished them completely. They will never be relevant again.” 

Daily Wire podcaster Matt Walsh wrote on X post-Trump victory

“I think for all of us who cover elections and talk about elections and do this on a day-to-day basis, we have to figure out how to understand talk to and listen to the half of the country that rose up tonight and said, ‘We have had enough.’” 

 Scott Jennings, CNN commentator.

Is it ironic that Jeff Bezos, Amazon entrepreneur who owns the “liberal” Washington Post, got a nine-figure appreciation in his stock because of the post-Trump victory market surge? The Post’s masthead that reads “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Was Bezos seeing the future when, days before the election, he pulled the Post’s expected endorsement of Kamala Harris?

The lowest expectation is that Trump will hammer traditional media harder than ever. “If history is any guide, Trump is never, ever satisfied with news coverage. He always wants a more pliant, propagandistic media. He even complains about Fox News on a regular basis, despite the network’s overwhelming support for him. Last month, he complained to Fox patriarch Rupert Murdoch about the network airing Democratic ads.

“Thus, Trump’s reelection portends a new period of hostility with major media outlets that strive for impartiality as well as partisan outlets that oppose him. This raises another set of questions… Will the Trump administration turn his words against the press into actions? Will he move to revoke licenses for TV stations, as he has suggested more than a dozen times this year? Will he limit press access to the White House, barring reporters he doesn’t like?... Further, will media outlets engage in self-censoring to appease Trump, and if so, how will readers and viewers who oppose Trump react?

“On Wednesday [11/6] morning, newsroom leaders and owners are reassuring employees that they will have their backs in the uncertain months to come. ‘Now, more than ever, we are steadfast in our mission to uphold the principles of independent journalism,’ Conde Nast chief Roger Lynch wrote in a memo to staffers. ‘A thriving, independent press, as protected by the First Amendment, is vital to democracy and the future we all share.’” CNN News, November 6th. That thriving independent press got it wrong. Their pollsters missed macrotrends that showed America’s most successful conman was gathering votes in unexpected places, notably Hispanic males endorsing old-school masculinity. Their bias against Trump’s abysmal character glowed brightly. Younger voters, hooked on TikTok and X for their news, didn’t have a chance to be swayed by mainstream media; they don’t watch it. Women were supposed to vote Democrat over abortion, but it seems that issue hardly drove them to Harris.

Many hope that Trump’s resounding victory (gaining almost 70 Electoral College votes over Harris) would placate the hard right. But as the November 6th Wired points out, MAGA extremists want Trump to drill down on the liberal mainstream press and targeted Democratic opponents: “Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States, and the same far-right extremists emboldened by his first administration are celebrating his win with violent memes and threats… Many of the social media posts reviewed by WIRED reveled in fantasies of Trump locking up and even executing his political opponents in revenge. ‘Build the gallows!!’ urged a post on Gab, a social media platform that caters to the far right.”

In the past, Mike Davis, a Republican lawyer and former Senate aide whose name has repeatedly come up as a potential attorney general, “has said he wants to imprison journalists in ‘gulags,’ though the line between what Davis calls ‘trolling’ and his earnest dialogue sometimes isn’t easily discernible , as a Politico profile from September noted… In any event, Davis‘ string of posts following Trump’s win made no mention of taking the ‘high road,’ so to speak… ‘F--- unity. We have the votes. And they tried to kill Trump,’ he wrote in another post minutes earlier, making an overly broad reference to ‘they.’” The Daily Beast, November 6th.

Former Mike Pence national security advisor, Olivia Troye, noted on MSNBC on November 7th, “Trump risks putting a target on the back of anyone who opposes him… he would effectively grant immunity to extremists who could commit acts of violence on his behalf… Who will stop him? Allies like Steve Bannon, Mike Flynn and Stephen Miller? The Supreme Court? The Justice Department? Don’t kid yourself…

“‘Trump has been building his own media company… A worst-case scenario would see this becoming an arm of the government, not unlike state-sponsored propaganda outlets in autocratic countries. There's no guarantee that will happen, but the free press could increasingly face intimidation: comply or else. And if journalists become restricted, the public will be starved for objective reporting.’” And exactly what risks would liberal journalists face as Trump pardons hundreds of violent insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021? Retribution and revenge have been high priority campaign platforms in Trump’s MAGA world.

I’m Peter Dekom, and as MAGA nears controlling the House as well as the Senate, we may be watching the rest of the driving force to repeal the First Amendment.

A Tale of Two Countries Sharing the Same Landmass: the USA

A Tale of Two Countries Sharing the Same Landmass: the USA

“Them” vs “Us”

But who is the “them” vs who identifies as “us” is a virulent question. And to say it is complicated is an understatement, one that confuses scholars and laypeople furiously. It is so divisively obvious that there is a serious question as to whether the “United” in the “United States” is a super-example of misinformation. First, despite that name in our nation, the USA was never designed to enhance or protect “equality,” even as that status is all over our most basic and founding documents. For specifics, I suggest a short visit to my recent Modern Democracy – Transition of Power from Land to City blog showing where structural inequality was built into our system from day one. Fundamentally, most Americans identify with some underlying grouping that excludes and marginalizes the “other.” Regardless of election results, we have risen to a level of hatred of the “other,” that in marital terms, we seem to have irreconcilable differences.

But as a basic sociological examination of the United States would explain, we a nation where incumbent power has slowly separated itself “from the rest” – literally into a system where laws and economic governance provide power and benefits to privileged classes simply not available to anyone else… laws and restrictions either do not apply to them or are easily circumvented. Mega-power brokers and their corporate holdings allow them to operate “outside the system” as transnational islands charting their own path, even if that path is harmful to the US, their nation of citizenship and purported fealty. A simple example of this vector is provided in the October 25th Wall Street Journal:

“Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a linchpin of U.S. space efforts, has emerged this year as a crucial benefactor for Donald Trump’s election campaign, and could find a role in a Trump administration should he win. Meanwhile, Musk has kept in regular contact with Vladimir Putin, discussing geopolitics, business and personal topics, a Journal team reveals. The dialogue could signal re-engagement with the isolated Russian leader, and reinforce Trump’s expressed desire to cut a deal over major fault lines such as the war in Ukraine.” These powerful incumbents are both insulated from obvious liability and often use their money and power to push the system into political directions that favor their interests at the expense of their own country.

There is likewise a growing tendency of government officials’ openly defying laws they simply don’t like. As the Journal of the American Bar Assn (in an October 25th piece by Lee Rawles) illustrates, based on a book (The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy by lawyer and journalist Jessica Pishko): “Jessica Pishko takes a deep dive into the history of this position in American life and at a far-right movement hoping to co-opt the role of sheriff to advance extreme conservative policies…. There are about 3,000 sheriffs in the United States, one per county (or county equivalent).... Ninety-seven percent of the land area in the United States is considered rural, but only 20% of the people live in those rural areas…

“Pishko explains the ‘constitutional sheriffs’ movement, including its similarities to other fringe movements like the sovereign citizens. Adherents claim that sheriffs alone have the power to interpret how the Constitution and the first 10 Amendments should be enforced in their counties. They claim that state governments, the federal government, the president and the U.S. Supreme Court have no power over sheriffs, and that as elected officials, sheriffs are answerable only to their constituents.” Guess who funded their campaigns for elective office. MAGA sentiments have been around long before Donald Trump, but he clearly unleashed their power, no matter what.

Using their wealth, with phalanxes of lawyers and vast pools or uncapped political contributions, these well-heeled special interests have both created a different tax structure for themselves and made litigating fairness back into the system cost-prohibitive for almost everyone else. That wealth has allowed them to use mass-disinformation campaigns to generate political support from once-marginalized groups yearning for power over those now blamed for their obviously reduced incomes and status. It has worked brilliantly even as it dooms the United States into a campaign of mutually assured destruction… decimating democracy and political survivability. Those with money have learned to use the legal system with malice and devious behavior to service their greedy goals, turning the entire legal system into their servants.

As Debra Cassens Weiss, writing for the October 22nd ABA Journal notes: “A federal judge in Boston complained during a status conference… that lawyers from three high-profile law firms had filed so many motions and documents that they were failing to keep litigation just, speedy and inexpensive, as required by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.” I’ve watched cases where Big Law will file a barrage of motions, even knowing that they well be denied, often filing parallel cases in other jurisdictions to wreak havoc in the main case, even in other states, clog the appeals process with expensive and very unnecessary processes that delay trials, and demand information and documents from the lesser party while fighting the same requests from the other side, knowing that as costs mount, most folks just give up. Unlike the British system, absent a contractual or statutory basis, losers do not have to pay the legal fees of the prevailing party.

We don’t tax wealth, other than real estate property tax, except when the wealth-generating assets are transferred. Billionaires can borrow against those assets, deduct the interest, roll over that debt indefinitely, knowing that loan proceeds are not taxed… and that their heirs will generate major tax benefits in connection with asset appreciation at the death of the owner. Their ability to buy politicians with campaign contributions, even legally bribe Supreme Court justices, insulates them from the tribulations of the rest of us. No matter the political pledges to the contrary, without a ground-up overhaul of our entire economic and politic systems, this bifurcation of the rich and the rest of us, evidenced in the explosive widening of income/wealth inequality gap, upward mobility and the American dream are dead… in search of an appropriate gravesite and illustrative tombstone. We “made America great again” for us… not you.

I’m Peter Dekom, and our “designed to support inequality” foundational documents have been twisted, abused, manipulated to guarantee the growth of even more income/wealth inequality… unless somehow Americans reach beyond the cacophony of misinformation and force fairness and equal justice back into the United States of America.

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Christian… Running Scared

“God never needs a majority… All He needs is a faithful remnant.”

Christian fundamentalist and former Kansas Governor, Sam Brownback.

Gallup Polling reported in March: “Two decades ago, an average of 42% of U.S. adults attended religious services every week or nearly every week. A decade ago, the figure fell to 38%, and it is currently at 30%. This decline is largely driven by the increase in the percentage of Americans with no religious affiliation -- 9% in 2000-2003 versus 21% in 2021-2023 -- almost all of whom do not attend services regularly.” Catholics and evangelicals led the list with the greatest declines, and the trend lines show that formal religious beliefs skew older, and withdrawal from those practices skews younger. As older Americans pass, replaced by rising younger demographics, we can most certainly expect further contraction, particularly in faiths with the greatest rigidity and most extreme beliefs.

Yet as this diminishing and less-than-a-political majority has experienced wild success in ending the notion of separation of church and state, watching the Supreme Court give the edge to religious conservatives in commerciality and public support for schools, getting books that offended them off school and public library shelves and killing off Roe vs Wade, all they seem to have done is to invite a backlash against their religious triumphs that threaten to undo their vectors forward and contract their flocks further. What equally upsets them is that their “anointed to lead them” candidate is faltering in the polls as the election approaches. Even if Trump prevails in November, unless he is successful in his transition to autocracy, the writing is on the wall.

The reality of rising generations of voters: they are more tolerant of gender, racial and ethnic diversity, they resent incursions into their private and personal lives and climate change is a huge concern for their futures. On the other hand, there is one unifying word for the conservative elements of the evangelical community: discouraged. Reporting for the September 13th New York Times, Elizabeth Dias and Ruth Graham delve into this new era evangelical disappointment: “On a recent Tuesday afternoon, Sam Brownback, the former governor of Kansas and a champion of socially conservative causes, asked a small crowd of his fellow Christian voters if they were feeling discouraged.. Inside this church in Grapevine, Texas, nearly every hand shot up.

“The response might seem mystifying: These voters had won huge victories, most notably in overturning Roe v. Wade, which had guaranteed the constitutional right to abortion… And Mr. Brownback sat alongside a former football coach whose victory in another Supreme Court decision allowing prayer on the field symbolized the court’s decisive swing in their favor...But with the presidential election closing in, hope suddenly felt thin. Powerful efforts to ‘suffocate’ their values seemed to be everywhere, Mr. Brownback said to widespread agreement…

“The country is growing more secular and pluralistic by the year, with regular church attendance declining. Many leaders in the Republican Party, their political home for decades, have gone silent about their opposition to abortion rights and same-sex marriage. And, Mr. Trump, the man once considered to be their strongest champion, is publicly distancing himself from their causes, even as he attacked Democrats in the presidential debate for their support of reproductive rights.

“For decades, their views have been embraced and pushed by the Republican Party. When Mr. Trump ran for president in 2016, he made a promise — ‘Christianity will have power’ — to groups unsure of his loyalty to their cause. Even after he lost re-election in 2020, Mr. Trump gave them overwhelming victories through the judicial system he remade. Overturning Roe was the culmination of a generational battle for conservative Christians, delivering a victory that amounted to one of the biggest political resurgences in American history.

“But in this post-Roe era, the political landscape has grown increasingly fraught for them… ‘We had been on offense for 50 years, and now they’re on offense,’ said Ralph Reed, a longtime conservative operative who led the Christian Coalition in the 1990s. ‘That doesn’t mean that we won’t ultimately prevail, it just means that we’re in a different season in that struggle.’” It’s hard for conservative Christians to feel that Jesus is not protecting and advancing their cause. The notion of many evangelicals, that God promised no more global mega-catastrophes following the Great Flood, flies in the face of devastating hurricanes, storm surges, tornadoes, wildfires and flooding that seem to haunt red states with particular ferocity.

Even the millionaires and billionaires willing embrace this social conservatism that brings with it GOP tax cuts and deregulation, are beginning to understand that their customers and even many of their investors are reacting extremely negatively to efforts to micro-manage their lives into a direction that is no long part of the modern world. And that’s bad for business!!! Ask Elon.

Still these evangelicals know that at least one powerful federal governmental body is with them for the long haul, likely to impose that white Christian nationalist mandate no matter how hard local initiatives, legislatures and even Congress may try and reverse these trends. The Supreme Court is theirs… for several decades to come.

I’m Peter Dekom, and hardest opinion to change, regardless of empirical reality, is one based on the belief that God has ordained the only path forward… and let no man rend that vector asunder.

Welcome to Amerika

 

“There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of – and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact, the work that we have done.” Kamala Harris during an October interview on ABC’s “The View” on how she was different from Biden

“Kamala Harris lost this election when she pivoted to focus almost exclusively on attacking Donald Trump… Voters already know everything there is about Trump – but they still wanted to know more about Harris’ plans for the first hour, first day, first month and first year of her administration… It was a colossal failure for her campaign to shine the spotlight on Trump more than on Harris’ own ideas.” Veteran pollster Frank Luntz on X

John Stewart excoriated pollsters on his Daily Show. They never figured it out. Yet, the Democrats self-emolliated in oh, so many ways, all while operating in a political system labeled as a “flawed democracy” (per the UK The Economist) based on: gerrymandered districts, legitimized voter suppression, an inane “Electoral College” (the only one of its kind on earth), supermajority rules where it matters most (including the Senate 60-vote majority required to bring a bill to a vote), two Senate seats where Wyoming (with 600,000 people) is the equal of California (with 39 million)… a mandate that cannot be amended, distorting the First Amendment into a legally open spigot of mis- and dis-information, with a constitution that is virtually unamendable in a polarized universe, a lifetime appointed Supreme Court justices with no ethical limits, and the reality of 13,000 school districts which have become local political footballs. If we can even use the term “American democracy,” it is definitely not a representative democracy. 2024 isn’t 1789.

The Democratic Party’s choices also doomed its demise. Joe Biden evidenced his age, even as Trump’s elderly status was ignored. Biden should have declined a second run and let the next generation duke it out for the nomination. It was axiomatic that his VP would rise in a last-minute withdrawal, a mixed-race woman in an increasingly misogynist, racist nation, with a mass of terrified voters living on fear and mythology, many seeking comfort in the possibility of a white Christian nationalist nation. But what tipped the election heavily was that large, heavily male Hispanic (white?) segment that tilted several swing states, in a vote for machismo values. As bankruptcy and financial fraud king Trump hammered exaggerated evils of immigration and made vague “I was on the Apprentice” projections of his economic expertise, Harris focused on attack.

With the Senate securely in GOP control, Trump knows he can reconfigure the federal government for decades. Senate confirmations of Trumps’s cabinet appointments, federal judges and Supreme Court justices (Alito and Thomas are likely to resign to allow much younger justices to reign for their lifetimes), and hence bureaucrats that will restructure the federal government for decades, are so long-term pervasive that he really does not have to use force to create the autocracy he seeks. We await the determination of the House races, but a GOP win there would give Trump total control of all three branches of the federal government.

The state with the biggest loss, even as it reelected a super-majority Dem legislature under a Democratic governor and two Democratic Senators, is California. Governor Gavin Newsom, seen by many as a probable presidential candidate in 2028, loses his political position in 2022 (termed out) from which to launch a presidential bid. The rising star in California is clearly newly elected Senator Adam Schiff (since he was also part of the special election, his term starts immediately). Schiff has an advantage as a most-outspoken moderate liberal, able to withstand attacks by MAGA opponents with dignified force. My advice to the next California governor: take a page from the Republican governors in Texas and Florida… resist, defy and obfuscate Trump’s policies mightily, even if courts force otherwise.

We live in a new America, where we have literally “weaponized” the First and Second Amendments – we have more guns than people (including 20-30 million semiautomatic assault rifles with few guardrails) – and legitimized baseless attacks on opponents, suborned destructive conspiracies as “alternative facts,” made racism and political violence acceptable and have created a Plutarchic Citizens United vs FEC, where money from the mega-rich legitimately allows the powerful to have unlimited influence in the media marketplace, a crime in most other democracies.

I’ve kept this short for obvious reasons. There is a great deal of post-election revisionism and iteration of that which seems obvious in 2020 hindsight. The test of democracy, the question of American credibility (especially with our allies, knowing Trump/Musk have a direct line to Putin), the survivability of our system of government and the impact of bizarre Trump policies on our economy… will be tested over the next four years. American values have changed. The definition of our future, in almost every way, is up for grabs. And that will also shape global politics in expected ways as we disengage from our traditional role in influence and economic interdependence.

I’m Peter Dekom, and in the words of Donald John Trump, the 47th Presidential of the United States, prepare to “stand back and standby.”

Courtship from Hell

Please forgive my loan

Jan 6th Stop the Steal Symbol

Sam Alito’s House

Courtship from Hell

A Broken System of Long Appointments and Partisan Judges

Our highest court is rife with what would be criminal corruption in most democracies … as well as festered with conflicts of interest. Without enforceable ethical rules, the Supreme Court’s approval rating has never been lower. The most blatant evidence: Justice Clarence Thomas’ deep wink-wink financial benefits – through the auspicious of Leonard Leo’s rightwing Judicial Education Project, a nonprofit group he advises, and by means of more direct travel, real estate benefits and strategic loan forgiveness – to Samuel Alito’s dramatically open embrace of political philosophies reflecting extreme rightwing bias (evidenced by flags reflecting support for while Christian nationalism and the upside-down US flag, an unambiguous “stop the steal” symbol).

“Leo’s relationship with Thomas is [also] under scrutiny after Leo arranged for Virginia ‘Ginni’ Thomas, the Supreme Court justice’s wife, to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work just over a decade ago, specifying that her name be left off billing records, according to documents reviewed by The Post. Reporting by The Post shows that Leo instructed the conservative pollster Kellyanne Conway in 2012 to bill the Judicial Education Project, a nonprofit group he advises, and use that money to pay Ginni Thomas. Leo told Conway that he wanted her to ‘give’ Ginni Thomas ‘another $25K,’ the documents show. He emphasized that the paperwork should have ‘No mention of Ginni, of course.’” Washington Post, May 5, 2023

As the virtual carte blanche rulings against meaningful gun control, decisions to support states’ efforts to disenfranchise voters and the reversal of Roe vs Wade attest, the Supreme Court changed daily life in America in a huge way. It’s July presidential immunity ruling in Trump vs United, a case that seems to fly in the face of basic democracy, paves the way for autocracy without a parallel judicial check and balance… under the guise of exempt, colorable, “official acts.” Whatever else is said and done, the power of a president, to influence and literally control our future for decades with lifetime federal appointments, is staggering and unstoppable today.

Writing for the Journal of the American Bar Assn (October 31st), Berkeley Law School Dean and Professor, Erwin Chemerinsky, explains the recent history of such judicial appointments: “Between 1960 and 2020, there were 32 years with Republican presidents and 28 years with Democratic presidents. In this time, though, Republican presidents selected 15 Supreme Court justices, while Democratic presidents chose only eight.

“Much of this was a result of the accidents of history as to when vacancies occurred. Richard Nixon selected four justices, while Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump each picked three. But no Democratic president since Harry Truman has selected more than two justices. Jimmy Carter had no vacancies to fill and President Joe Biden only one. By contrast, every Republican president during this time, except Gerald Ford, picked at least two justices.

“Put another way, while Trump chose three justices in four years, the prior three Democratic presidents—Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—served a combined 20 years in the White House but selected only four justices in those two decades… It is easy to see how much presidential elections matter, for the Supreme Court, for constitutional law and for people’s lives…” This reality makes Donald Trump, with his 6 to 3 ultra-conservative court, possibly the most important president in modern history. Against a precedent of avoiding election rulings soon before an election, Trump’s lower court appointments and recent “shadow docket” emergency rulings (where no majority opinion is made) may ultimately decide the November 5th election.

“[Under the guise of an emergency/shadow docket ruling, where the majority did not post an opinion, an 11th hour, a] divided Supreme Court cleared the way Wednesday [10/30] for Virginia officials to remove about 1,600 voters from the state’s registration rolls less than one week before the presidential election.” ABA Journal, October 30th.

“In recent years, the court’s conservative majority has been more willing to use its power to intervene in ongoing litigation through its so-called shadow docket. Legal scholars and liberal justices have criticized the practice. The court’s denial of the last of a slew of emergency bids to pause new Clean Air Act regulations suggests the justices are rethinking how they wield these emergency orders.” Jess Bravin for the October 31st Walls Street Journal. What’s worse, the machinations behind extending this judicial legacy are startling, as Ian Prasad Philbrick, writing for the October 31st The Morning (a NY Times newsfeed), explains:

“In recent years, judges have tended to retire in time to let the president they prefer fill their seats. The oldest sitting justices today — Clarence Thomas, 76, and Samuel Alito, 74 — are Republican appointees. If they stepped down during a second Trump administration, the president could choose younger replacements who would cement conservative control of the court for decades… What about lower courts?

“Judges can serve for life. So the more a president appoints, the more he or she can shape the country. The Supreme Court hears only about 80 cases per year, meaning that lower courts are often the final arbiter on many issues. They set precedent on criminal justice, bankruptcy proceedings, corporate disputes and antitrust enforcement, and on whether federal laws and rules are constitutional.

“In a typical four-year term, a president replaces about one-quarter of the country’s 870 active federal judges, across both federal district and appeals courts. Trump filled 231 vacancies, and President Biden may equal that number before the next Congress takes over… Partly as a result, Republican and Democratic presidents have each appointed about half of the judges on federal courts. The appeals courts lean slightly Republican, while the district courts lean Democratic (if you count senior judges who work less but still hear cases), according to Russell Wheeler of the Brookings Institution.”

As occurred during the Obama presidency, red state Senators blocked his Supreme Court nominations on a strictly partisan basis. When Trump took office, the floodgates for MAGA judges and justices swung open. Lifetime appointments of biased judges (for which there are ethics rules for federal appointees, but Supreme Court nominees are exempted) combined with an ability for a biased Senate majority to ensure partisan purity above duty to country for a very long time. Add to this horrible is the recent trend of rightwing jurists applying an ambiguous interpretation standard of “originalism,” requiring citing historical precedents to vet constitutional decisions… making judges historical researchers. That was never envisioned by our Founding Fathers. Our federal judicial system is a mess! No one can count on common sense or past Supreme Court rulings with any confidence anymore. Planning becomes a quagmire of partisan ambiguity.

I’m Peter Dekom, and without enforceable ethical rules for all federal judicial appointees, term limits and a mechanism to prevent the bias of extremes from dominating court rulings for decades, our federal courts will continue to devolve into the cacophony of judicial farce.

Mired in Distrust, a Novel System, Our Founding Fathers Weren’t Comfortable with Democracy

Perhaps the greatest flaw in those initial efforts, after rejecting those Articles of Confederation, was the fundamental belief that only good “men” would rise to federal office, particularly the presidency. Fearful of a new excuse for an American monarchy, battling for fairness in what was well over 90% an agricultural/rural nation against those monied urban trade centers, those founding negotiators did not fully understand how to make democracy work. Virginia, New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania (with a little New Jersey thrown in) were the power players. In an effort to placate sectional interests, they left us with a bizarre electoral college, lots of election controls relegated to the states, overwhelming requirements to amend the Constitution (requiring a truly united nation), a bow to agricultural power by designating two Senators based purely on land mass (states, without reference to size… an unamendable Constitutional provision) and that wonderful and thoroughly ignored “plain meaning” of the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments).

That level of trust never anticipated a candidate willing to pull out all the stops to win the presidency. The “good men” have been marginalized, in his autocratic, even fascist efforts; Trump managed a “free speech” killer that will linger well past this election, as the October 29th Guardian UK suggests: “Veteran journalists and media critics are using a very different phrase to describe Soon-Shiong’s and Bezos’s choice: they’re saying the two billionaires, among the richest men on the entire globe, are performing ‘anticipatory obedience’ to Donald Trump… [a] term [that] comes from On Tyranny, the bestselling guide to authoritarianism by Timothy Snyder, a historian of eastern and central Europe. The phrase describes, in Snyder’s words, ‘the major lesson of the Nazi takeover, and what was supposed to be one of the major lessons of the twentieth century: don’t hand over the power you have before you have to. Don’t protect yourself too early.’ It’s a way of describing what Europeans did wrong as totalitarians came to power: by ‘mentally and physically conceding, you’re already giving over your power to the aspiring authoritarian’, Snyder explains.”

Many Americans are justifiably scared of the mega-MAGA focus on subverting and denigrating the election process itself, perhaps a future reality American if democracy survives: “the Stop the Steal movement of 2020 has evolved into the considerably more sophisticated ‘election integrity’ movement of 2024, its success is still premised on persuading election administrators of two things that are not true: that widespread election fraud is a real and present threat to democracy and that they have not only the authority but also the legal duty to do something about it — that they must ‘do their duty’ and deny certification.

“[There is a] growing number of election officials who seemed willing to do exactly that. For them, going so far as to block certification wasn’t a partisan gambit; it was a patriotic duty. Though it might technically be illegal, it obeyed a higher law. Over months of reporting, this is what I heard again and again. For all the cynicism involved in the effort to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss, and the groundwork being laid to challenge a possible defeat this year, many officials I spoke to were clearly motivated by a deeply held belief that a grand conspiracy was underway. In the face of that, how could they agree to certify?” Jim Rutenberg for the October 28th New York Times. How did we get here? Can a form of government and an archaic and currently virtually unmendable Constitution withstand this vicious expert attack on our constitutional guardrails? Let’s look back at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 to see out this all started.

It's fairly obvious that a constitution, born of a citizen army with no real guidance as to how to fashion a democracy, was not designed to contain an autocratic party, led by a messianic zealot using a false Biblical interpretation, willing to ignore its dictates and do whatever he could to rule under a strict and profoundly undemocratic mantle. Writing for the October 29th Los Angeles Times, Joseph J. Ellis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author of an upcoming book, Realities and Regrets: The Tragic Side of the American Founding, describes these founding failures as the albatross of limitations they contain:

“As we travel back in time, there are a few features on the historical landscape unique to post-revolutionary America that will strike us as strange… One is the ghost of Britain’s King George III. The debate over executive power, as recorded in contemporaneous journals, letters and articles, is difficult to follow, like watching a soccer match played with three balls and no referees. The one conviction the delegates could all agree on was that the president must not be a monarch who stood above the law. (The recent Supreme Court decision, Trump vs. United States, fragrantly defied that core conviction.)

“The second strange-to-us feature, even more disturbing to our current political presumptions, is a deep suspicion of democracy. Throughout the American founding the word “democracy” was an epithet, and remained so until the Jacksonian era. The watchword during the founding era was ‘republic,’ from the Latin ‘res publica’ meaning ‘public things.’ The public interest, for Madison, Jefferson, Washington and the others, was the long-term interest of the people, something the founders thought the bulk of voting Americans (white male landowners) would seldom comprehend because of their limited horizons and susceptibility to conspiracy theories, misinformation and demagogues. (Sound familiar?)

“When the question of how to elect a president arrived on the agenda in August 1787, suggestions included election by the Senate, by state Legislatures and finally by popular vote in all the states. Multiple critics objected to the latter option on the grounds that popular opinion was notoriously unreliable… These raw and misguided opinions needed to be filtered through more informed and educated minds. James Madison stepped forward to coin the term ‘filtration’ and then ‘Electoral College’ to describe state legislators capable of comprehending the long-term public interest, and, if necessary, over-ruling the popular vote in the states. Alexander Hamilton endorsed this ‘filtration’ approach in Federalist 68.

“Filtering the presidential choice through electors was not designed to enhance the political power of the Southern, pro-slavery states, but that in fact is what it did. During the debate over how to count population for representation in the House, the delegates passed the three-fifths clause, basing representation on ‘the number of whites and three-fifths of the blacks.’ The political advantage the three-fifths clause gave to Southern states in presidential elections was the main reason that Thomas Jefferson was referred to as ‘the Negro president’ after his narrow victory in the election of 1800.

“The ironies of the electoral college abound. The founders did not foresee the emergence of political parties and their winner-take-all slates of electors, which make a mockery of all presumptions of virtuous choosing by a select few. What’s left is indeed a filtration of the popular vote, but one that has morphed into a device whereby the minority defeats the majority… As a result, the very outcome the founders most feared, namely election of a demagogue by a gullible cult of true-believers, has been made possible because of the electoral college, which was originally designed to avoid precisely that outcome.”

As contemporary elections have resulted in victories for presidential candidates who lost the popular vote, as the first such constitutional democracy produced a constitution that was inflexible and in polarized times, unamendable… unscrupulous candidates have exploited these weaknesses, further eroded by the current US Supreme Court bending and twisting to impose rigid conservatism in a way never intended; the fallacy of “originalism” for constitutional interpretation is a rightwing trope to ensure permanent control.

I’m Peter Dekom, and what can we do with an old, very old constitution constructed in the era of muskets and centuries before social media, where clever lawyers chip away at the clear intentions of our Founding Fathers?

New Politics American Style?

New Politics American Style?

Who Has the Guns and is Ready to Use Them

In the back of my mind, as I catalog all the threats of civil war or armed insurrection based on the election, I needed to remind myself of how many firearms are in US civilian hands and where those weapons are concentrated. According to AmericanGunFacts.com (January 22nd), “With over 434 million guns privately held… According to Pew Research, among Americans that own only one gun, 62% own a handgun versus 22% who own a rifle, with the majority of those being AR-15s. The remainder own shotguns.”

There are an estimated 20-30 million AR-15-style semiautomatic firearms in that mix, and they are the preferred weapon of mass shooters, trained militia (most of which are MAGA-oriented) and are the likely firearms of choice in a civil war or an insurrection. According to a recent poll from Quinnipiac University, 27% of Republicans support an assault weapons ban and 70% oppose, while 88% of Democrats support the idea and 11% oppose it. In terms of gun ownership in general, Republicans own more than double the number guns owned by Democrats, and only blue states have tried to limit or ban such assault weapons. In recent years, AR-15 sales have exploded, so the above ownership splits suggest which side is more likely to shoot in forcing a leadership change that does not jibe with actual voting results. 

Recently, Newsweek pulled an article from December 20, 2021, noting that “Millions of Angry, Armed Americans Stand Ready to Seize Power If Trump Loses in 2024.” The earlier piece, written by David Freedman, began by presenting a disabled Vietnam vet, armed with an AR-15, as he moved towards Trump’s speech at the Ellipse on January 6th, “[He] is no loner. His political comments on the social-media site Quora received 44,000 views in the first two weeks of November [2021] and more than 4 million overall. He is one of many rank-and-file Republicans who own guns and in recent months have talked openly of the need to take down—by force if necessary—a federal government they see as illegitimate, overreaching and corrosive to American freedom.

“The phenomenon goes well beyond the growth of militias, which have been a feature of American life at least since the Ku Klux Klan rose to power after the Civil War. Groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, which took part in the January 6th riot at the Capitol and may have played organizational roles, have grown in membership. Law enforcement has long tracked and often infiltrated these groups. What [that Vietnam vet attending the January 6th Washington, DC gathering] represents is something else entirely: a much larger and more diffuse movement of more-or-less ordinary people, stoked by misinformation, knitted together by social media and well-armed. In 2020, 17 million Americans bought 40 million guns and in 2021 were on track to add another 20 million. If historical trends hold, the buyers will be overwhelmingly white, Republican and southern or rural.

“America's massive and mostly Republican gun-rights movement dovetails with a growing belief among many Republicans that the federal government is an illegitimate tyranny that must be overthrown by any means necessary. That combustible formula raises the threat of armed, large-scale attacks around the 2024 presidential election—attacks that could make the January 6 insurrection look like a toothless stunt by comparison. ‘The idea that people would take up arms against an American election has gone from completely farfetched to something we have to start planning for and preparing for,’ says University of California, Los Angeles law professor Adam Winkler, an expert on gun policy and constitutional law…

“Absent a strong response from some combination of police, National Guard and military, it's easy to see how Republicans would be in a position to essentially take control of the country simply by virtue of their massive arsenal. ‘Both sides might be equally convinced of the illegitimacy of the other's actions,’ says Winkler. ‘What's asymmetric is the capability to inflict violence.’… Let's hope it doesn't come to that, and that there's a relatively peaceful resolution to what's likely to be a contentious, hotly disputed election. But that result isn't assured. And even if any conflict ends quietly before it gets too far, experiencing a near-miss might leave our already fragile democracy more weakened and vulnerable. It's hard to say what it would take to repair it.”

Well, there a whole lot more AR-15s in civilian hands today, and there are militia who “stand back and stand by” ready to use those guns to force Trump into the presidency even if he loses the election… with significant grassroots support from the MAGA base. According to a September national poll from PRRI, about a quarter of Republicans and 1 in 7 Americans overall believe force of arms should be undertaken in the event that Trump loses. A plethora of open carry laws, mostly in red states, send a clear and intimidating message to Trump’s opposition.

As the election neared, Trump’s cries for retribution, setting aside constitutional limits – using the Department of Justice and even the military to round up and arrest clearly named senior Democrats as well as any body of protestors that may oppose him or his policies, while shutting down Trump-critical news media – have ratcheted up both in frequency and overt hostility. His followers are repeating his threats, many willing to do whatever it takes if the election results do not produce the results they demand. Even a highly respected four star general and Trump’s former chief of staff, retired Marine Gen. John Kelly – describing the former president’s plans, practices and focused intentions as making Trump a “fascist” – have only incented the extreme MAGA base to force the creation the United States as a clear white Christian nation where their interpretation of the Bible overrides the Constitution.

I’m Peter Dekom, and yet a vast majority of voters still see this election as based on underlying issues and not the Trump oft-repeated threat that would effectively end our democracy, to be replaced by a white Christian nationalist (fascist) political system.

Replacing the Administrative State of Experts with the Layman’s Courts of Angry Biased Judges

The United States has become the land of powerful, culturally biased amateurs, railing against educated “elites” and those who believe major policy decisions should be anchored in facts and scientific probabilities. Many believe that they can vote and revoke the laws of physics, decades of massive scientific and medical research and experience, with rulings based instead on religious beliefs or conspiracy theories. Or that their politically driven judicial appointments can do the dirty work for them. The 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization Supreme Court reversal of Roe vs Wade gave these zealous extremists hope that all of what they believed were anti-Christian laws and decisions could be eliminated. Science be damned!

These anti-elitists insist that their beliefs can be forced on fact-driven experts and the majority of Americans who know better, even when such mandates decimate personal choice and individual freedom. Unfortunately, Mother Nature doesn’t care. If humanity opts for self-destruction, so what; Nature started with nothing and clearly can start over again. Only the hardy cockroaches are smiling… right along with the antivaxxers, DEI opponents and the climate change deniers.

We’ve seen a lowly, deeply evangelically-driven federal judge in Amarillo, Texas, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, challenged two decades of medical safety for an FDA-approved birth control pill – mifepristone – by banning the drug in 2022, overruling that long-standing FDA approval (FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine). While the Supreme Court threw out his decision, it did so simply by stating the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue. The merits of the case were not addressed. Kacsmaryk seemed to ignore a 1984 Supreme Court ruling, in Chevron USA v. National Resources Defense Council, that held where there was ambiguity in statutes that accorded administrative agencies with the power to implement Congress’ mandates in specialized arenas, courts should defer to the agency experts’ interpretation of that ambiguity: the “Chevron deference.”

But in June, “[the Supreme Court], in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, ruled that Chevron ‘defies the command’ of the Administrative Procedure Act, requiring that ‘the reviewing court’ rule on issues of fact and questions of law relating to agencies… [Their] landmark ruling overturning Chevron deference has introduced vulnerability into the power of federal agencies—but attorneys are conflicted about the significance of the outcome, which they say may be much ado about nothing…

“The now-defunct doctrine, however, had not been utilized widely in recent years. One of the last cases affirming the Chevron doctrine was 11 years ago in City of Arlington v. FCC, relating to the Federal Communications Commission’s interpretation of the 1996 Telecommunications Act amendments to the Federal Communications Act, says Will Dodge, managing partner and CEO of [the law firm of] Downs Rachlin Martin in Burlington, Vermont.

“This changed following a recent fishing lawsuit. In Loper, fishing companies challenged the enforcement of fishing limits set by the National Marine Fisheries Service, which falls under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The plaintiffs argued that the costs associated with government-required monitors on commercial fishing boats were unfairly burdensome. The core issue: the interpretation of who should bear these monitoring costs.

“The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the fishermen, deciding that courts shouldn’t defer to an agency’s interpretation and should instead exercise independent judgment.” Danielle Braff, writing for the October 14th Journal of the American Bar Assn. The law Chevron deference had been so ingrained in legal practice that litigation challenging that Chevron deference was considered a futile waste of time. But that was before Donald Trump’s judicial appointments, including the reconfigured US Supreme Court now with a 6-3 rightwing majority, offered Luddites, religious extremists, gunowners who cared little for gun safety, the January 6th Capitol insurrectionists and even white Christian nationalists an opportunity to impose their will, their vision for American, on everyone.

The more moderate view is that Loper may force clearer administrative rulings with less political bias. “Some attorneys are optimistic that going forward, the litigation playing field between regulators and the regulated has been leveled. For the last 40 years, says James Tysse, a Supreme Court and appellate partner with Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Field, agencies had the primary power of interpreting statutes that were less than crystal clear. But after Loper Bright, he says, courts now have the responsibility to determine what interpretation is best.

“‘For clients on the fence about filing suit, we are telling them that their likelihood of success has just increased,’ Tysse says… They can even challenge older regulations, including potentially previously affirmed as reasonable cases under Chevron, he adds.” ABA Journal. Maybe moderation will rise, or Loper just might have opened the door to rich corporate interests who oppose financial or environmental limits and white Christian nationalists to press their beliefs as mandates on us all.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while I can hope for moderation, the decisions of the Trump judicial appointees strongly suggest otherwise.

Modern Democracy – Transition of Power from Land to City

European countries, for the most part, are smaller nation states, more compact and focused on their major cities. As their political systems evolved into representative democracies, even as they may have designated states and provinces, political power rested primarily with the heavy concentrations of people in large cities. Even as rural constituencies felt marginalized, decisions still continued to favor the urban population centers. By way of example, in modern France, the “yellow vest” protestors, farmers whose trucks and tractors closed in on Paris, blocking roads and streets, failed to move the needle much in their direction.

When the United States adopted its founding governance and underlying documentation (the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Electoral College, Congressional districts, etc.), it was a nation that was 97% based on agriculture, with heavy suspicion from states with vast rolling land with few urban interruptions against manufacturing and trading centers concentrated in cities. Slavery, uncommon in Europe even as European nations dominated the slave trade, was deeply embedded into the American political system, even though “slavery” is not mentioned by name in our pre-Civil War Constitution.

The early battle between urbanized states (most northern states did not permit slavery) and the rural states addressed slavery in a battle over proportionate representation in Congress and allocation of federal benefits. The South wanted slaves to count in districting without according them any rights. The negotiation produced Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the US Constitution: “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.” Hence slaves were effectively 3/5th of a person but completely powerless unless a state provided otherwise.

According to a Princeton University historical analysis of US demographics: “From 1830 to 1930, the pace of urbanization substantially accelerated: the share of the population living in an urban area increased six-fold to 60 percent. After a decade of stasis, the urban share again increased rapidly from 1940 and 1970 and then more slowly from 1970 to 2010, reaching 80 percent in 2010.” By 2050, that number is expected to hit 90%, and even today fewer than 2% of Americans are directly involved in farming. But in 1789, farming states remained deeply concerned that states with increasing urbanization be restrained from altering a status quo that gave farm states disproportion power. Wyoming, with under 700,000 people, has the same two US Senators as does California with approximately 40,000,000 people.

It is statistically possible for under 20% of the United States to elect 50% of the Senate. Our 1789 solution – called the Connecticut Comprise – sealed the voting supremacy of rural America defining Congress: the Senate, granting equal voice to every state, and the House, based on population. Added to this was the ultimate protection for rural states’ rights: equal state representation in the Senate is the only provision in the Constitution that remains singled out for protection from the amendment process; no state can lose its full complement of senators without its permission. To make matters vastly worse, the United States has the least amendable constitution among democratic nations. Simply put, land mass trumps urban population centers in voting power. An American rural voter has about 80% more voting power than an urban voter. While Europe focused on population centers in its allocation of voting power, the United States concentrated on land mass.

The very images of American culture, from food (“as American as apple pie”) to the imagery of our “wild, wild West” (embedded in a litany of American films and television programs) to NASCAR and rodeos… are rural based. It is within this context that the MAGA strategy is brilliantly based. White supremacy and the marginalization of people of color (also generally associated with “immigrants”) is drilled into the basics of our political heritage, with immutable protectors against “upstarts” rocking that white Christian nationalist “status quo.”

Contemporary suspicion of educated elites, almost always a product of high-end urban university training, is deeply embedded in the very definition of being “American.” An image of a farmer plowing his fields is so much more a symbol of being “American” than a scientist holding a test tube. Farm vs city. Open spaces and vast resources vs universities with too many “elites.” Modernity vs getting back to basic values linked to the land. Rural communities subject to the vagaries of nature (drought vs rain) are united around their churches, cities around their corporate centers and artistic venues.

Some of the lesser-noted protests reflect this urban rural schism. Writing for the October 4th FastCompany.com, Devin Liddell defines a new rebellion against hallmarks of impersonal but rising technology, very much focused in cities, as “modus non grata.” And while this is a global phenomenon, it is heavily manifest in American cities: “Los Angelinos hurling e-scooters into the ocean. Residents of San Francisco and Chandler, Arizona sabotaging driverless cars. Barcelonians squirting cruise ship passengers with water pistols. Borrowing from the Latin term persona non grata for labeling an unwelcome person, modus non grata describes when modes of transport are similarly ostracized and made into proxies in conflicts about the futures of cities.

“The origins of these aggressions are straightforward when we consider that the transportation we use reflects our values. This is true for us as individuals and as communities, and this is especially true when a mode of transport becomes a symbol of adjacent socioeconomic and ecological conflicts. Los Angelinos hurled e-scooters in the ocean because those scooters are emblems of gentrification. Residents of San Francisco and Chandler sabotaged driverless cars because those vehicles are exemplars of an erosion in public trust. Barcelonians harassed cruise ship passengers because cruise ships are representations of over-tourism.

“The conflicts are about something else, but transportation is the way we fight about them. So far, this era of modus non grata has emerged within individual cities. But there are signs that it will go global with transformative effects.” Yet change is inevitable, though its consequences usually leave a large segment of the population behind. Neo-Luddites, perhaps but rural populations – cast under a MAGA spell – are feeling their oats, experiencing growing Schadenfreude at the pain of cities… and doing everything in their power to exacerbate that pain in ugly “retribution.” Even in red state Texas, most of its big cities are Democratic strongholds, marginalized by ample application of gerrymandering. With our archaic political system, cities need to grow even bigger to stop this built-in rural tilt so well-protected by the Constitution.

I'm Peter Dekom, and all this talk of ending polarization and reuniting Americans faces strong resistance among rural voters who continue to revel in their disproportionate political power.