Good and Dead: No Labels, no weapons of mass destruction, no public option, and now no more

 

The obituary page of The Massachusetts Spy

By Obituary Editor Luke Reschuss with Connecticut Correspondent Dink Stover in New Haven

Former Senator Joe Lieberman (Likud – Conn.) finally made a contribution to American political life.

He died.

To his dying day he was a force for bad, whether by shilling for a bloody gruesome war of lies in Iraq, blocking public option health care to protect the profits of the useless private insurance industry, or, at the end, working to destroy what's left of American democracy by shilling for a preposterous “No Labels” vanity bomb candidate to ensure the election of the Tangerine-Faced Rap(c)ist.

Thank you, Joe Lieberman...

None of that mattered to the usual suspects who couldn't wait to salute Lieberman the brightest light of bipartisan “moderation.”  That supposedly sterling quality revealed itself on any number of occasions.  Including 2008, when, despite his long career in Democratic politics, he endorsed John McCain and Sarah Palin over Barack Obama, due in part to McCain's and Lieberman's shared love of starting pointless foreign wars and impugning the patriotism, character, and intellect of anyone who thought otherwise.

He would have toiled away in relative obscurity as a Senator from Connecticut (that's south of here) had not Bill Clinton enlisted twentysomething White House intern Monica Lewinsky in a bit of West Wing rocket-polishing.   Lieberman led the tut-tutting.  When Al Gore won the 2000 nomination, he decided to put Lieberman on the ticket to cleanse the Clinton stain.

Lieberman was hardly an adornment to the ticket, losing a debate to, wait for it, Dick Cheney.  After his ticket won the popular vote but lost Florida by 487 votes in the initial count, Lieberman's whiny equivocating undermined Democratic efforts to take a hard line against George Bush's election thievery.  Nonetheless, Lieberman had the temerity to claim at his obituary interview in 2023 that the Supreme Court's awarding of the election to Bush was a travesty of justice.

Gee, was there any other time that this pillar of principle might have spoken out?  Like during the recount itself when he insisted that illegal ballots should be counted if they came from soldiers?  Or in the aftermath of the Court's law-free decision?

Fortunately (for him, not for the country), he was able to resume his Senate seat just in time to play a huge role in the Republican campaign to respond to the 9/11 attacks by invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, thereby wiping out hundreds of thousands of lives and crippling thousands more for no purpose whatsoever.

During those sorry years, Lieberman's droning voice was an inescapable presence on the Sunday gabfests, where he could be counted on to slap a bipartisan veneer on insane Republican talking points.

Lieberman got a free pass until he colluded with George Bush and Dick Cheney in their mendacious effort to start a war with Iraq on the basis of lies about weapons of mass destruction (Iraq had none) and links to 9/11 terrorists (also none).

He supported the pointless, gruesome, lie-based Iraq War from the get-go.  His support never wavered, even when the dimensions of the catastrophe, including the massive human rights abuses, were clear to even the meanest intelligence.  In 2006, he declared that the US was on the road to success as the war raged; in 2008, he supported keeping more U.S. troops mired in Iraq longer (the infamous “surge”), a squandering of American blood and treasure that did nothing other than ensure that responsibility for ending the disastrous escapade would fall to Barack Obama.  G. Mitchell, So Wrong for So Long 153, 217.

He even decided that he could ride the Iraq debacle into the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2004.  After Democrats told Bombs Away Joe to sod off, and then refused to renominate him for his Senate seat in 2006, Joe nursed a grudge against Democrats that never went away.

...or should we say todah rabah?

After supporting McCain and Palin in 2008, he turned to undercutting Obama's bold health care plan.  As the crucial 60th vote for Senate approval of Obamacare, Lieberman refused to vote for a health care plan that would go on to save thousands of lives and provide coverage to millions who had formerly been uninsured unless it was sabotaged to protect the profits of useless private insurance companies.

By opposing the “public option” that would have allowed consumers to buy health care from a public non-profit cooperative, Lieberman stoutly defended the interests of health insurers (many headquartered by remarkable coincidence in Connecticut) over the public interest in getting the best coverage at the lowest cost.  If private companies were so wonderfully efficient, why would they fear competition from a nonprofit competitor, you may ask?  He even sank Harry Reid's watered down compromise limiting the nonprofit option to those 55 and over.

Thanks to Joe, millions of Americans today are overpaying for health insurance to protect the profits of the health insurance oligopoly.  Another todah rabah!

He continued his crusade against everything right and decent in American politics until his last breath. With the connivance of his weird angry hard-right pollster and shill, Mark “Lumpy” Penn '75, he campaigned recently for a “No Labels” candidate who would run against Trump and Biden and lose to Trump.  Even though every decent human being turned him down (although indecent heroin-addled lunatic Bobby Kennedy Jr. '76 thought he'd try to ensure Trump's re-election with his own vanity bomb campaign), Lieberman kept at it:

At almost every major turn, Lieberman served as the group’s chief public defender. He was also a private force in No Labels’ presidential recruitment push. He insisted repeatedly in interviews, as recently as last week, that the nation is craving an alternative to Trump and President Joe Biden. “This is the moment for a bipartisan unity ticket,” Lieberman told Bloomberg Television last Thursday. “Now, we’ve just got to find a strong bipartisan ticket to recommend to the No Labels delegates in the next couple of weeks. That’s not easy.”  

Look at it this way, Joe: it won't be any harder just because you're dead.

But we can't leave old Joe to his eternal reward without noting one attribute that he always attached to himself which appeared prominently in his obituaries:

He supported Israel and called himself an “observant” Jew but not an Orthodox one because he did not follow strict Orthodox practices. His family kept a kosher home and attended Sabbath services. To avoid conveyances on a Sabbath, he once walked across town to the Capitol to block a Republican filibuster after attending services in Georgetown.

Many Democrats criticized Mr. Lieberman’s support for the war in Iraq, but admirers said his strengths with voters lay in his rectitude, his religious faith and his willingness to compromise.

If you want to be an Orthodox Jew, be our guest if it's meaningful to you, although don't preen about how you observe some of the Sabbath commandments but not the one about abstaining from work, even if that work is only conniving in the Senate or preparing for your 900th appearance on Meet the Press.

More fundamentally, strict observance of 613 mitzvot doesn't excuse you from your duty as Jew of tikkun olam: to heal and repair this world. That's why no one who really follows the Tanakh could support the brutal death of hundreds of thousands for no reason in Iraq, protect the profits of insurance companies over the lives of those in need of health care, or connive to ensure the election of a depraved corrupt bigoted criminal whose every thought, word, and deed contravenes Jewish ethical teaching.

If you have any doubt as to Lieberman's devotion to everything appalling and rotten in American politics over the last thirty years, we can set your mind at ease.  The Republican apparatchik who has captured the hearts and minds of his editors and owners at The New York Times had this to say about Lieberman:

He must have said other stupid things too in the course of his two-minute read, but those two minutes were too precious to us to waste.  

Anyway it's not our job to shill for Bretbug.  That's what Gail Collins is for.

A lot of the fawning obits for this guy glossed over his terrible policy positions and his efforts to destroy the Democratic Party by referring to him as a mensch.  Examples of his menschlichkeit are somewhat harder to come by. A mensch fights for the right things, like justice here and peace around the world.  A mensch certainly doesn't do anything that helps a corrupt subversive indicted Russian-owned racist and sex offender return to power.  As far as we can tell, the only thing Joe Lieberman ever fought for was Joe Lieberman.

The more accurate term to describe such an individual is a schmuck.

At best.

Don't be stupid - it's not the stupidity

By Political Editor David Bloviator with
Florida Correspondent Jenny Herk in Palm Beach

Now we know whom the two parties will nominate for President this year.  

On the Democratic side, it's the friendly moderate seasoned incumbent, bringing a solid record of achievement and legislative success, not to mention economic growth and low unemployment.

On the Republican side, it's an adjudicated rapist and confessed sex offender who is currently under indictment for 91 count 'em 91 felonies and tried to overthrow democracy after he lost the 2020 election.

No contest, amirite?

Um....

Source: The Hill.

With the differences between the candidates so stark, what can account for Trump's hold on almost 45% of the American electorate?

One leading hypothesis is appealing in its simplicity:  Trump voters are stupid.  The more elegant expression of the case goes something like this:

Throughout US history the most successful con men have all relied on three characteristics of their marks—gullibility, absurdity, and believability—from...Charles Ponzi to Bernard Madoff to Donald J. Trump. Ironically, when the “jig is up” and even months or years later...most of the other marks who have been deceived tend to excuse the fraudster rationalizing his behavior....

The simpler expression can be found by anyone still on Twitter:

 

The stupidity theory passes the test of Occam's Razor.  But theories need to be more than simple.  They need to be not falsified.

For adherents of the stupidity explanation, the facts are fatal.

First, there are plenty of Trump supporters with college degrees and beyond:

Some argue that the a college degree is no guarantee of intelligence, and we have a lot of sympathy for that view:

Perhaps Trump’s resurgence among college-educated voters says less about those voters or Donald Trump than it says about what college education has become in the United States: factories for turning out employment-ready adults with economically efficient money-making skills and an adolescent winner-take-all mindset rather than thoughtful, self-aware human beings who understand that their greatest responsibility is to support the communities that not only made their education possible but also a civil society itself.

More cynically put, kids don’t go to college to become better thinkers; they go to get a piece of paper that tells employers they’re smart. 

Well, OK. But you have to admit that some of Trump's rabid supporters are intelligent and highly-educated (they're just evil).

Consider the pride of Princeton and Harvard Law School, Cancun Ted Cruz.  He was smart enough to flee Texas when the lights went out.  And his former Harvard Law professors remember him as smart, although Laurence Tribe boasted that he only gave Cruz an A on his Con Law final when Cruz expected an A+. 

Equally loathsome Trump taint polishers and insurrectionists like Senators J.D. Vance, Tom Cotton, and  Josh Hawley graduated from Harvard and Yale Law Schools.  Stupid?  Seems unlikely.

Another fatal falsification of the stupidity hypothesis:

The poll results vary dramatically by race and gender.  Biden runs 10-12 points stronger with women  compared to men.  The differences by race are even starker.  A recent NBC News survey, supposedly calling out the decline in Biden's Black support, said Biden beats Trump with Black voters 75-16, or about 40 points better than the all-in results.

Are Black people 40 points smarter than white people?  Ten, maybe, but 40%?

So the stupidity explanation seems to fall. Our Wonderful Republican Allies have a variant on the stupid theme, which is that Trump voters have had their brains consumed by the Tangerine-Faced Rac(p)ist and exist in a zombie-like state of loyalty to the cult:

Trump is attempting to rebrand Jan 6 insurrectionists as "patriots" & the day of the attack as a new Patriot’s Day. They're not heroes, they're thugs with a blind allegiance to one man. Why’s he doing it? To take heat off his own legal troubles and criminality. We won't let him. pic.twitter.com/NKpjEGDu7h

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) March 19, 2024

Blind allegiance? The former Republican hacks now doing business at The Lincoln Project use this cult argument to claim a radical discontinuity between the Grand Old Party they supported, which boasted great beloved Republicans like Spiro T. Agnew, Strom Thurmond, Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Jesse Helms, and Dick Cheney. And Rudy Giuliani.  

The stupidity explanation innocently and the cult explanation mendaciously cover up the truth: Trump's followers like him because they share his unjustified white-supremacist male grievance and his willingness to use violence and subversion to protect white privilege:

Trump’s power as the boss of the Republican political crime organization has grown. The loyalty of his MAGA followers has certainly not weakened, and may have increased. Tens of millions of Americans have eagerly embraced Trump's criminal gang, and many millions more are, at the very least, willing to tolerate it and indulge it. 

That's why the Republican messaging “Are you better off than you were four years ago?"” which sounds insane to anyone who actually remembers the catastrophic COVID winter and spring of 2020 plays to Trump's base.

They are always better off when they see that an angry old white man who shares their values is in the White House, spewing hate and violence and siccing armed troops on unarmed Black protesters, right up until the moment when they have to be put  on ventilators.

The Republican song hasn't really changed in over fifty years.  It goes like this:

Didn't need no welfare state
Everybody pulled his weight
Gee the old LaSalle ran great.
Those were the days.

Mainstream Republicans have a few loose screws, doors, panels, windows, etc. etc.

 By Financial Editor Samuel Insull with
Aviation Correspondent Douglas Corrigan

Like omens, pieces of Boeing planes keep dropping out of the sky.  A door plug out West.  Another 737 Max left its wheel in San Francisco.  Then an exterior body panel fell off somewhere over Oregon.

And let's not forget the 346 innocents who died because Boeing didn't want to tell pilots about the changes they had snuck into the 737 Max autopilots.

Sounds like some planes and some people have a few screws loose.

How'd that happen?  

As we've mentioned before, it's due to the usual suspects: rich white men and Republicans.

The story of how Boeing's culture of profits-first and safety last led to the catastrophic 737 Max 8 disasters has been well told elsewhere by the great James Surowiecki elsewhere so we don't see the value in plagiarizing him further here

Doors closed. Wheels on.  Those were the days!

Oh, OK just one quote:

Boeing migrated away from an engineering-centric culture in order to boost profits and shareholder value.

Actually some of the sordid details are worth mentioning.  They start, as with much corporate malfeasance, in the boardroom:

During a series of meetings in 2010 and 2011, Boeing’s board discussed how the company should respond to the threat of a new, more fuel-efficient line of Airbus jets, ... The board talked about how it would be faster and cheaper to revamp an older version of a Boeing jet.

The plan to revamp an older 737 jet included larger engines mounted farther up on the wings, which altered the plane’s balance. Boeing engineers designed the [lethal] MCAS software to compensate for this imbalance. In both crashes, investigators believe an instrument called an angle-of-attack sensor fed the MCAS software bad data, causing it [to] push the planes’ noses downward.....

One challenge for board members is a lack of technical expertise. [One] Boeing director ...doesn’t remember anyone in that group questioning whether a reconfiguration of the 737 with larger engines would create trade-offs that would affect safety.

“The board doesn’t have any tools to oversee [safety],” [the director] said....Some corporate boards, such as JetBlue and Dow Chemical, mandate safety oversight in their bylaws, seeing it as a part of their duty to manage risks. Boeing’s corporate governance principles do not mention the word “safety,” and its board does not include any experts in airplane safety.

Who was worthy (and spineless and ignorant) enough to serve as a Boeing director?

Wait for it...

Photo: Washington Post

Note she wasn't around for the fatal crashes, but as for the recent safety lapses....

We'll get back to her, as soon as we find out where she is.

The investigation into the door plug debacle has revealed the surprising tidbit that the company that actually duct-tapes the plane's body together is not Boeing itself, but something called Spirit AeroSystems.

Who they?  It turns out they're a separate company that used to be part of Boeing until it was spun out in 2005.  It seemed like a great idea at the time, according to Forbes:

Oh.

Why in the name of Wilbur and Orville Wright would you separate the building of the plane from the company that is supposed to build planes?  The original idea was to unload some prairie factories it no longer wanted onto a private equity consortium, while retaining the option to buy what the factories made. 

But the hard-eyed money men (apologies to Russell Baker) at Boeing realized that spinning out the enterprises that actually bolted together the planes could have a number of good effects, including unloading the expenses and bother of negotiating with a unionized work force off its financials and onto someone else's.

As for safety, well:

The underlying cause of problems on Boeing’s production lines are not clear, but analysts and some former employees point to pressure to meet delivery schedules and, more recently, workforce turnover during the coronavirus pandemic.

Over the years, former company employees have come forward with concerns about what they viewed as sloppy work at Boeing’s plants. The Senate Commerce Committee documented many of those issues ...based on the accounts of seven whistleblowers. The whistleblowers included Ed Pierson, a former manager at the 737 factory, who alleged an unusual number of quality control problems at a plant under “relentless schedule pressure.” 

It's not surprising given that Boeing accounts for 64% of Spirit's revenue.  When one customer who represents almost two-thirds of your revenue says jump you say how high.  And when it says you need to work faster you say, “Thank you sir may I have another.”  You don't say you need more time to attach the bolts to the door. 

Although its 10-K is a little squirrely on the details, it appears that Spirit supplies the fuselages for a fixed price.  Therefore, if it has to spend more on say safety (like making sure the doors stay on), that's Spirit's problem, not Boeing's.  Nice for Boeing's profits, but less nice for passengers who didn't want to fly to San Francisco in a convertible.  Maybe that's why Spirit has lost over $1.6 billion in the last three years (losses that don't appear on Boeing's income statement of course).

In the wake of recent developments and stuff falling off the planes, Boeing and Spirit have talked about merging the two companies, which would have the salutary effect of making Boeing financially responsible for its planes.  Salutary unless you are a Boeing honcho whose lavish compensation is tied to profitability and stock performance.  

But delegating the real work of bolting together the planes to a subordinate nominally separate company might be good for transferring losses of out of Boeing, but sadly for Nikki Haley and Boeing management, it doesn't insulate Boeing from having to deal with its woke deep-state out-of-control regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration.

The FAA is now telling us that Boeing has flunked 1/3 of its safety procedures audits:

George W. Bush thought that 66% on an exam was good enough for him at Yale and thereafter, but when it comes to the lives of passengers, the FAA says maybe not.

The FAA wasn't always so rigorous in its oversight of Boeing, according to The Washington Post:

The 2018 and 2019 [fatal 737 Max] crashes...raised questions about how the agency had reviewed the design of the Max, an updated version of Boeing’s popular 737. Investigators found that regulators had failed to understand the risks posed by an automated system that pushed the noses of the planes down before they crashed, in part because Boeing employees had sought to minimize its significance. The FAA relies heavily on Boeing employees to carry out safety work on its behalf, but in some cases those workers have reported feeling pressured by the company to rush their work.

The last time you were pulled over by cops and you told them you weren't drunk, did they rely on your self-certification?

Before regulation took away our freedoms.

The FAA's what-me-worry attitude didn't come out of nowhere. And here we get back to our friend and Boeing director Nikki Haley. For over half a century, it has been a fundamental tenet of Republican dogma that regulation is bad, bad, bad and we should let the free market regulate itself. Of course, those who died in air crashes don't get to vote.

The Republican Party's ideological arm (one of them at least), the CATO Institute has only 17,392 examples of the derogatory term “administrative state” on its website.  Spoiler alert: they hate it.  Matthew Continetti, better known as Billy Kristol's son-in-law, who holds a sinecure at AEI, another fake “think tank” admitted the through line from St. Ronald of Bitburg to the Tangerine-Faced (but regulation-hating) Fascist:

Any conservative president would have embraced [tax cuts for the rich], deregulation, and originalist judges.

And the authors of 2025 Project, the neo-Fascist blueprint for the forthcoming Trump dictatorship, admit that dismantling the regulatory system (of which the FAA is a part) lies at the core of their mission:

Trump-era conservatives want to gut the “administrative state” from within, by ousting federal employees they believe are standing in the way of the president’s agenda and replacing them with like-minded officials more eager to fulfill a new executive’s approach to governing.... Much of the new president’s agenda would be accomplished by reinstating what’s called Schedule F — a Trump-era executive order that would reclassify tens of thousands of the 2 million federal employees as essentially at-will workers who could more easily be fired.

Letting Lara Trump fire FAA aerospace engineers? The wheels would never fly off of that. 

And how would Nikki Haley have reined in the power-mad administrative state?

Haley, meanwhile, has said she would limit federal government officials to five years in the same job. On its face, this is even more sweeping than Trump’s plan, since it would apply to the entire federal bureaucracy — the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell argued that it would “destroy the basic machinery of government.” 

You wouldn't want her company Boeing regulated by anyone with extensive experience and institutional memory, would you?

The decades of Republican hostility to and undermining of regulation in the public interest set the stage for the collapse of oversight at Boeing, whose consequences can be found scattered all over the back yards of Oregon.

And if Trump is elected in 2024, the best advice we have is: stay on the ground and stay alive.

Who will save us from this bent Supreme Court?

By Legal Correspondent Saori Shiroseki

Another week, and another set of fresh outrages from our Republican-bent Supreme Court.

In their ceaseless effort to re-elect whatever Republican is running for President to ensure that the Court will continue to be packed by bent extremist Republicans like Sulky Sam Alito and Brett “It just wants some fresh air” Kavanaugh, the Court produced two terrible decisions relating to the Tangerine-Faced Defendant's effort to seize power and avoid justice until he is able to fire his prosecutors.

Arguably the worst decision was contained in a one-page order setting down the TFG's appeal of his crapcan total immunity argument for April 25.  The Court knows full well that the immunity claim is ridiculous and must eventually fail, but its goal is to make sure that the insurrection trial doesn't take place before the election. 

Let's look at the record.

Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected Trump's preposterous immunity claims in a careful opinion issued on December 1, 2023.  To expedite consideration of any appeal, Special Counsel Jack Smith urged the Supreme Court to decide the matter directly, bypassing the D.C. Circuit.  

On December 22, the Supreme Court denied the request without explanation.

This not just in: the Supreme Court is bent

The D.C. Circuit duly heard the appeal on an expedited basis on January 9, 2024 and issued its opinion knocking down Trump's frivolous arguments seriatim on February 6, 2024. 

Some pundits thought that the Supreme Court's December denial suggested that they might just let the D.C. Circuit decision stand.

Wouldn't it be pretty to think so?

After sitting on the petition for Supreme Court review (which your mansplaining law school ex-boyfriend called “cert.”) for over two weeks, the Court on February 28 in its wisdom granted cert., blocked further proceedings, and set a hearing date almost two months in the future.

Funny they didn't take nearly that long to award the 2000 election to Republican George Bush.  It took them four days.

This time, though, no one expects a decision until mid- to late-June at the least.  So four days to hand the 2000 election to the Republican, and four months before they will let a Republican stand trial for his insurrection.

Are you beginning to think this game isn't on the level?

And who knows how this Court will f*** up the obvious conclusion?  It could even say that there may be limited “official acts” immunity, pull some ad hoc standards out of Alito's blowhole, and demand that Judge Chutkin decide count-by-count whether the charged acts are “official ” before trial.

Even if they follow the law and uphold the D.C. Circuit, if the decision doesn't come down until the end of June, it may difficult if not impossible to hold a trial before the election.  Which is what the six bent Republican Justices want.

It might even lead to trying and convicting the President-elect on insurrection charges in November, before the Electoral College and the Congress meet.  Then what?  

Which brings us to the second pro-Trump opinion they issued in February: overturning Colorado's decision to bar the Former Insurrectionist-in-Chief from the ballot, contrary to the plain text of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, which had been passed after the Civil War to prevent insurrectionists from holding federal office.  Like the Presidency.

While all Justices, including the three unbent ones (and we'll get back to them), overturned Colorado's decision on the grounds that one state can't set standards that would affect a national election (unless they are intended to disenfranchise minority voters or put third-party spoiler candidates on the ballot like Ralph Nader or Jill Stein, which is OK, apparently), the Republican majority went well beyond what was needed to decide the case to pronounce that Section 3 a dead letter in the absence of legislation.

The unbent concurrence had some fun with this:

“If it is not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case, then it is necessary not to decide more.” Dobbs ... (ROBERTS, C. J., concurring in judgment). That fundamental principle of judicial restraint is practically as old as our Republic. This Court is authorized “to say what the law is” only because “[t]hose who apply [a] rule to particular cases . . . must of necessity expound and interpret that rule.” Marbury v. Madison....

Today, the Court departs from that vital principle, deciding not just this case, but challenges that might arise in the future. 

This modest jape at the expense of John Roberts '76, which would have gone unnoticed by 99% of the public, provoked a hissy fit from Handmaid Amy Comey Barrett:

In my judgment, this is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency. The Court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election. Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up.

Speaking of Courts settling politically charged issues without stridency, here's just a few highlights from the opinion she joined in Dobbs, which took away the reproductive freedom that 170,000,000 American women had enjoyed for over half a century: 

“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” [the opinion] said. “Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. ...Abortion destroys what those decisions call ‘potential life’ and what the law at issue in this case regards as the life of an ‘unborn human being,...”

Imagine what Alito would have written if he wanted to be strident.

But our point isn't that Amy Coney Barrett is a prissy hypocrite.

Our point is the one that dissenters on the Court have been making throughout this century: this Republican-bent Supreme Court is not a judicial institution but an illegitimate House of Lords, legislating according to its own terrible political preferences.

The question is what to do about it. 

Despite their grandiose behavior, the Supreme Court can be brought into line easily in one of three ways: (1) enlarging the Court with some new seats, (2) enforcing term limits for Justices (although probably not the bent six Republicans already there), or (3) limiting its power to f*** things up by for example taking away their ability to enjoin federal action prior to judgment or to void certain types of legislation (like voting rights).

We don't have space here to deal with the usual whines about these fixes, which run along the lines of how dare Congress politicize the Court.  But it's the Court that politicized itself and it's the job of the branches who were in fact elected by somebody to bring it back into line.

Then there's the argument that if a Democratic Administration can add seats and limit jurisdiction, a later Republican Congress could do the same thing. Of course they could and they will if they have to whether or not we beat them to the punch. In the long term, the rehabilitation of the Supreme Court into an institution devoted to justice and not reactionary Cathlolic extremism depends upon the will of the American people to make it so and keep it. No one is coming to save us.

Some brave souls have already advocated for some or all of these things, like our very own Sen. Ed Markey.  And some legal academics have weighed in as well, like Penn's Kermit Roosevelt, a surname not normally associated with treason.

But imagine if the pressure to fix the impossibly broken Court came from inside the building.  Three eminent justices in their dissent to Dobbs said:

The majority has overruled Roe and Casey for one and only one reason: because it has always despised them, and now it has the votes to discard them. The majority thereby substitutes a rule by judges for the rule of law

That's a plain statement of the illegitimacy of the current Supreme Court. Why shouldn't the three Justices who said it (Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan,and Stephen Breyer) take the obvious next step and say publicly to the political branches that it is their job to fix it? 

The Supreme Court is out of control

There's no good reason why they shouldn't speak in some public forum (hell, we bet Breyer could wangle a slot at Harvard Commencement) and do what George Marshall did 75 years ago: demand urgent political action.

Their action will be seen by the usual suspects as some sort of bad faith undermining of the Court as a national treasure of dispassionate justice.  But the Court lost that reputation almost 25 years ago:

this highly politicized matter....runs the risk of undermining the public’s confidence in the Court itself. That confidence is a public treasure.  

Bush v. Gore, 591 U.S. 38, 157 (2000).

What's the point of pretending the Court is acting as a court when it indisputably is not, according to the unbent Justices who sit on it? 

We'd argue that the maintaining the false pretense is itself dangerous because it helps perpetuate the injustice and corruption of the six Republican wardheelers in robes.  

Imagine how powerful the effect would be of three past and present Justices admitting that the current Court is not only strutting down First Street NE naked, its pubes flying into Coke cans all over Capitol Hill, but that the time has come for the President and the Congress to fix the ongoing coup against democracy with appropriate legislation.

Indeed, the time came in 2000. 

Pretending since then that nothing is wrong has led us to observe helplessly the plight of 26,000 pregnant rape victims in Texas and the outrageous stacking of the criminal justice system deck in favor of a corrupt Russian-owned insurrectionist criminal defendant.

The supposed treasure of the Supreme Court's commitment to the rule of law was looted years ago and the Nazis have loaded it onto a plane to Berlin.  It would be great if Stephen Breyer could like his contemporary Indiana Jones rise to the occasion and crack the whip.

388 years of indoctrination in Harvard Yard, anti-Semitic and otherwise

 

By Yard Correspondent Larry Lowell with
Archivist Aula Minerva

In case you haven't been paying attention, or, just possibly, you don't give a toss, things still aren't going Harvard's way, except they managed to screw the grieving survivors of corpses whose body parts were sold like merch by Harvard Medical School staff, thus proving the continuing viability of free-market economics.

Other than that, it's all bad.  The poor struggling hedge fund that runs a university on the side continues to be, like Joe Biden, beleaguered.

With the team of Garber and Manning, Harvard
has returned to its wise 400-year policy
of entrusting its governance to white men

The University's response continues to be tepid and tentative, much to the surprise of those who remember what a hell-raiser interim President Alan Garber '76 was back in Dunster House.  This week Garber, no doubt with the 1,000% backing of the Corporation (and you can ask Claudine Gay how much that's worth), appointed, after the proverbial worldwide search, a new interim Provost, who was found across Cambridge St. in the Dean's Office at Harvard Law School.

If you guessed that Garber chose a white man with multiple Harvard degrees, you win an all-expense-paid trip to Allston!

Garber's choice is one John Manning '82, J.D. '85.  Manning declared in the official Harvard newspaper, the Gazette:

“A great university must be a place of great humility, curiosity, and openness...”

Humility? 

Openness? 

Curiosity? 

At Harvard? 

This guy has his work cut out of him. 

Fortunately, his resumé is replete with instances of his service in humble, open, curious places:

Manning, a graduate of Harvard Law School and Harvard College, also held various notable positions earlier in his career, including serving as a law clerk to the Hon. Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court of the United States and to the Hon. Robert H. Bork on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Additionally, he served as an attorney-adviser in the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice and as an assistant to the Solicitor General in the U.S. Department of Justice.

Scalia. Bork. Why do those names sound familiar? And by the way, when did he “serve” in the Department of Justice?  You'll be shocked to learn that he did his stint in the Office of Legal Counsel, an agency devoted to arguing that the President can do whatever the f*** it wants, during the twilight days of the Reagan Administration, 1986-88.  No word on whether he worked on the memo confirming that the “arms for hostages” scam was well within the President's inherent power to sneak guns to the Contras.

We're going to go way out on the ivy here and speculate that Manning was put into the job to give Harvard desperately-needed credibility with its Republican tormentors.  After all, he's one of them.  I mean, if you're willing to kowtow to the guy who fired Archie Cox and the guy who boasted about his law-free rigging of the 2000 election, you've got to be comfortable dealing with Republican a**holes, right?

But Garber's move only shows how out of touch Harvard is with their persecutors.  In the old days, a well-connected Republican white man like Manning could place a few calls, jet down to DC for a quiet lunch at the Metropolitan Club, and all would be well.

Those days are over.  We doubt greatly whether his brilliantly-crafted arguments will cut much ice with the hooligans, crooks, Nazis, and thugs who make up today's Republican base. But maybe it's worth a try, if he's willing to take Lauren Boebert out for a, um, matinée.

Let's just say he's got a big stable to clean out. 

A recent example of the task that awaits him appeared in one of Harvard's two hometown papers, The Boston Globe:

A group of Harvard Jewish alumni is scouring the school’s course offerings, critiquing diversity and inclusion policies, and lobbying top administrators in an attempt to root out what they view as pervasive antisemitism plaguing the university....“There are entire Harvard courses and programs and events that are premised on antisemitic lies,” [said] Dara Horn, a writer and Harvard graduate....

Pervasive anti-Semitism in the University of Larry “Gals Can't Add” Summers and Counselor Underpants, former Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz? Entire courses premised on antisemitic lies? Huge if true.

Of course, Ms. Horn, a gifted writer with a, shall we say, unusual perspective has her own hot takes on truth.  She once wrote a novel intended as a historical survey of generations of supposed anti-Semitism, including a long chapter on how the Viet Cong were bad for the Jews.

If we were going to make inflammatory statements terming whole swaths of the Harvard academic enterprise as “premised on antisemitic lies ”we'd want to bring some receipts.

We'd at the very least want our organization, supposedly representing Harvard's Jewish alums, to be a shining model of free discourse and respect for dissenting views.

Um, not so much:

Prof. Feldman knows anti-Semitism when he sees it

One early member, Marc Bodnick, an entrepreneur and 1990 Harvard graduate, was kicked out of the chat forum after clashing with other members there about Elon Musk, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Israel-Hamas war. In messages, Bodnick was sharply critical of all three, prompting pushback from other members and, eventually, his expulsion. 

Free discussion and debate is all well and good, as long as you toe the group's Likudnik/neocon Republican line, as set forth in the Tanakh, of course.

But we were talking about pervasive anti-Semitic content in Harvard's academic offerings.  Like what?

In WhatsApp messages and in planning documents reviewed by the Globe, some HJAA members articulated the view that antisemitism is exacerbated by Harvard professors teaching students certain worldviews, such as those that divide the world into “oppressors” and “oppressed.” Some argue these viewpoints lead to demonization of Jews and Israel — a claim that has led to fierce campus debates and pushback.

So could viewpoints expressed by Plato, for arguing that a state should be ruled by secular philosophers, for that matter. Sounds like advocacy of a one-state solution in which Jews could be a minority!

Or of course a theory that emphasizes the struggle between oppressors and oppressed might be philo-Semitic, depending on where you put the Chosen People. Or even worse, the historical record might allocate them to both sides to some extent, depending on the evidence (like the remorseless 60-year Israeli occupation of the West Bank.)  This would seem to be a paradigm of the kind of open debate for which a university is dedicated,  even the lesser ones – like Yale.

You might think that but if you do you're just another Jew hater.  Big thanks to Harvard Law Professor and happily married man Noah Feldman for enlightening us:

The core of this new antisemitism lies in the idea that Jews are not a historically oppressed people seeking self-preservation but instead oppressors: imperialists, colonialists, and even white supremacists.

Well, are Israelis on the West Bank or Gaza oppressors or not? If you think that universities or even just ordinary folks in Dearborn, Michigan should have the option to explore this question in light of, you know, facts, you're a new-style anti-Semite, according to Prof. Feldman. 

But there's a deeper intellectual failing in scouring the Harvard course catalog for examples of ideologies you don't like.  The enterprise proceeds from the fallacy that Harvard has fallen from its former glory as a purveyor of objective non-ideological knowledge to which it must be compelled to return by deep thinkers like Virginia Foxx and Bill Ackman. 

But has it?  We happen to have on our shelves the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences Courses of Instruction from 1973.  Let's take a look back at the days before Jew-hating ideology infected the purity of Harvard's intellectual pursuits.

Back then, the History Department offerings were refreshingly free of all that anti-Semitic oppression stuff.  Instead, eager young minds, including jocks looking to fulfill their pre-1600 distribution requirements, could take three, count 'em, three full-year courses on the “Great Age of Discovery” (History 136, 137 & 138).  

As oppression is nobody's idea of greatness, we're going to guess that in that halcyon era, any discussion of the possibly oppressive treatment of indigenous populations and imported Black slaves was avoided.  Since, unlike the football team, we didn't take “Boats,” we can't be sure.

Over in the Government Department, where oppression as a political phenomenon might be discussed, the totally non-ideological offerings included Gov. 148, taught by clash of civilization gasbag Sam Huntington, asking how long the American political system might last and considering its “viability and future.”  Fortunately, there's no oppression in this topic.

And of the six courses offered in International Relations, none explored issues like colonialism, oppression, or racism, because as was well known back then those issues play no role in international relations.

You can go all the way back to 1636 to learn that Harvard was founded as a sanctuary of wide-open and unfettered inquiry, free from any taint of anti-Semitism. Actually, it was founded to train Puritan ministers.  That sounds a wee bit anti-Semitic to us.

The point is that for 388 years, Harvard's offerings have reflected some ideology or another, whether it was training future witch hunters in Salem or future war criminals like Henry Kissinger.  There is no single objective model of a suitable curriculum, despite what you might have been told in Gov. 106a, Ancient Political Theory. Looking at the history of the world and deciding that the oppression of some groups by others is a worthy organizing principle seems as valid as the former principle that white men conquering a New World already full of people not in need of conquest was “great.”

See any oppression here?

And none of it is either a cause or effect of anti-Semitism.

Speaking of oppression, David Ignatius, a very mainstream Washington Post pundit, reported on the reason Gaza is starving:

But in late January, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir told police to allow demonstrators to close the main border crossing at Kerem Shalom to protest Hamas’s refusal to release all hostages.

 

With the crossing blocked, panic began to spread, U.S. officials say. Food supplies in Gaza soon became scarce, triggering hoarding and looting. United Nations relief workers were attacked by armed gangs as they tried to bring trucks into Gaza. The trucks had been accompanied by Gazan police. But the police were affiliated with Hamas, and after Israel began targeting them with drones, the U.S. officials told me, the police backed away. 

Is that oppression of a hungry civilian population by an extremist hatemonger with a senior position in a heavily armed state that denies to West Bank Palestinians the rights of free movement and self-determination, among others?

Discuss.

If Noah Feldman and Dara Horn will let you, that is.