For whatever reason the Trump Administration’s plan to remake American nuclear waste storage and disposal policy - read: Junk Yucca Mountain, the long identified site for the nation’s high level nuclear waste - has not, even in a minor way, broken into our news cycles.

Like much else in Trump World the new nuclear waste policy just appeared in a leaked story in late July, an idea fully baked (or half baked) with Congress sidelined (or ignored).

Then the administration with minimal hype - a strange method for this usually hyper-ventilating crowd - announced that five states are in a competition in which three “winners” get to create what the Department of Energy (DOE) calls Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses.

The image conjured was, as journalist Randy Stapilus noted, of a leafy, academic environment where big thoughts are pondered and huge scientific breakthroughs engineered.

The fine print in the Trump plan, as usual, held the real news.

In exchange for promises of big bucks in new investments (billions and billions) the three “winning” states would agree to take up to one-third of the nation’s stockpile of high level commercial nuclear waste.

I’ve been writing about Idaho being one of the five states in part because I’ve had something like a front row seat on the state’s decades long love-hate relationship with DOE. During most of those decades there was a strong bipartisan consensus that Idaho and its eastern Idaho DOE facility, the Idaho National Laboratory, would never become a designated waste site, even though the site has been “storing” waste “temporarily” since the beginning of the Cold War.

The other states in the running for the entirely dubious distinction of being the host site for around about 30,000 metric tons of spent nuclear reactor fuel are Utah, Tennessee, Oklahoma and Louisiana. You may notice something about those states. Answer to follow.

The Idaho case is particularly curious because of the state’s long history of opposing more waste coming in, as well as the fact that Idaho has a one-of-a-kind, legally binding agreement with DOE to remove waste and clean up problems that stretch back decades.

In order to be a “host” state Idaho would have to junk the solid legal and moral leverage it has against a federal agency that is, at its best, not always entirely on the candid side of its activities.

That Idaho is swimming in this pool is simply a striking reversal of policy led entirely by the state’s Republican governor and congressional delegation.

Why, one wonders, would even MAGA-allied Idaho Republicans take at face value a DOE promise in exchange for big train loads of nuclear waste?

Well, maybe the Idaho elites quietly pushing this scheme have very short memories.

Memories are much longer in Nevada.

The secrecy is very telling

Ten days ago, and after writing two columns about Idaho’s involvement in the new Trump nuclear waste plan, I sent a short email to Emily Callihan, the communications director for Idaho Republican Governor Brad Little.

I honestly didn’t expect an answer, but thought the inquiry benign enough that it just might prompt a response or even a no comment. Here’s what I asked Ms. Callihan, who I have known for a long time:

Could you let me know who is negotiating (or discussing with DOE) on behalf of the state the Host Agreement related to the Nuclear Lifestyle Campus project?

And what role is the attorney general or his staff playing in the discussions? Has Gov. Little discussed the Host Agreement with the attorney general?

Apparently, I’m going to wait for a long, long time for a response.

Just to underscore how objectively odd this whole “host” state business is I will note that the governor of Idaho, the state’s attorney general, the four members of the all GOP congressional delegation have said nothing publicly - zilch - about the proposed enormous policy shift they hope to be part of.

No interviews, no news releases, no op-ed pieces.

They are not even trying to sell the idea of becoming a Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus, and a waste disposal site, to the state’s voters. 1

One can only conclude these elected officials are trying to tamp down any real public knowledge of the plan before the end of September deadline Idaho has agreed to for finalization of it’s “Host Agreement” with DOE.

And, of course, the politicians almost certainly hope to keep all this imported nuclear waste from becoming an issue in the November election where the governor, attorney general, Senator James Risch and Congressman Mike Simpson are all seeking re-election.

So far the plan is working.

Share

Now, about Nevada

In 2011 – a political lifetime ago – the Obama Administration drove a stake through the heart of the nation’s high level nuclear waste strategy when it refused to fund and then junked the licensing of Yucca Mountain.

Until Barack Obama and his Department of Energy (DOE) weighed in with a thumping veto, the nation’s strategy had been to develop a high level waste repository on public land in southwestern Nevada about 100 miles from Las Vegas. Sin City might have become the gateway not just to slot machines and lounge acts, but thousands of tons of commercially generated nuclear waste that then – and now – is stored at dozens of locations spread across the country.

There is a huge lesson in this not so ancient history for Idaho and four other states now volunteering to accept all that high level waste, the waste that Nevadans, particularly the late Senator Harry Reid, fought for years to keep out of the Silver State.

Reid, a devout Mormon who served two terms in the House and then the Senate from 1987 to 2017 where he became powerful on the Appropriations Committee and eventually majority leader, remains a reviled figure, even after his death, for many Republicans.

The wily, often underhanded, but deviously effective Nevada senator utilized all his cunning to deep six Yucca Mountain.

A large part of Reid’s extensive legacy is that he christened the bipartisan 2002 legislation designating Yucca Mountain the “screw Nevada bill,” and then he worked every lever of political power in Washington and Nevada to screw the rest of the country’s nuclear waste disposal plan.

When authorizing legislation for Yucca Mountain was approved by Congress – all members of the Idaho delegation voted to “screw Nevada” – it looked like the toxic zombie of commercial nuclear waste would finally end up tucked underground in a place out of sight and out of mind, in a state that rarely figured in national politics.

Yet, despite the federal government spending $50 billion studying and certifying the safety of the Nevada site it never happened. Politics, power and Harry Reid interceded. Nevada mattered.

Fast forward nearly 25 years and the Trump Administration has quietly walked away from any effort to revive Yucca Mountain opting instead for a five state lottery among deep red, profoundly conservative states that are apparently anxious to have what Reid fought like hell to prevent in Nevada.

In exchange for accepting up to one-third of the national stockpile of more than 90,000 metric tons of high level waste Idaho and four other states are being “promised” unimaginable economic benefits by the entirely transactional Trump Administration.

Were Idaho to win the lottery, Trump DOE’s says the state would see billions in economic benefits, thousands of new jobs and vast potential for data farms, university research and, given this administration, surely a Donald J. Trump Nuclear Research Center in Idaho Falls.

The only hitch: agree to accept all that waste, and in order to accept the waste, eagerly agree to shred the only real leverage Idaho has in dealing with a Department of Energy.

Idaho’s leverage is contained in Republican Governor Phil Batt’s 1995 Idaho Settlement Agreement. That agreement placed strict controls on waste storage in Idaho, imposed financial penalties on DOE and made the agreement subject to continuing federal court oversight. The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) Governor Brad Little signed with DOE in July explicitly acknowledges that Idaho is ready to discard Batt’s legacy.

The Trump nuclear waste plan that Idaho is embracing has all the certainty of the latest Trump cease fire with Iran or his latest tariff threat. The deal being embraced is as solid at the 2020 election results being “rigged” in Georgia. When it comes to nuclear waste storage, Idaho and the other states are being asked to “trust” the administration of a president who bankrupt a casino, is a convicted felon and has an approval rating in the low 30 percent range.

What could possibly go wrong?

Here is one way this could play out for Idaho.

High level commercial nuclear waste is currently stored in 35 states, most of the 70 or so sites are adjacent to working or decommissioned nuclear power generating facilities. Most of these states and the electric utilities in these states are eager beyond measure to get rid of their waste. They must quietly be celebrating that Idaho, Utah, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Tennessee are effectively saying “bring it on.”

Consider at least two very important political facts

For the Trump Administration nuclear waste scheme to work as advertised, Congress will need to appropriate the billions envisioned to transform the Idaho desert or a Tennessee river bottom into a “Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus.”

Those billions for states willing to accept nuclear waste will face massive competition from many directions, including unprecedented requests from the Defense Department to continue Trump’s war in the Middle East, as well as acquisition of new weapons and other material. New federal spending like that envisioned in the nuclear waste lottery will run headlong into the astronomical sums being spent on immigration enforcement, debt service on an expanding federal deficit and a few presidential vanity projects like a ballroom and a triumphal arch.

And there is this political reality: many of the states currently most invested in storing commercial waste are likely going to be genuinely happy to get rid of that waste but perhaps not so interested in bestowing billions of dollars on Idaho.

Take Illinois for example, the state with the largest amount of commercial waste, or Pennsylvania that ranks second or New York and California, all states with large stockpiles of waste that residents, politicians and utilities would love to see in, well, a place like Idaho.

Imagine a coalition of U.S. senators from these waste storing states banding together and deciding to pull a Harry Reid in reverse.

Senators from the 35 waste storing states – that’s 70 votes in the Senate – might just decide that they don’t even need to “screw Idaho” they can just point to the state’s eagerness to become a waste disposal site. They wouldn’t need to appropriate all the money needed for the promised economic goodies. They could just decree that those states will house the waste. 2

Idaho’s Republican leadership has signed on to a potentially massive bait and switch, predicated on promises from a federal agency and an administration that could end up shafting Idaho because, well, why not?

It’s certainly happened before.

If you think Mike Crapo and Jim Risch are up for this fight, DOE has some waste for you.

Harry Reid must be smiling.

Leave a comment

Since the beginning of his second term Donald Trump has signed at least 270 Executive Orders (EO), dozens of which have been fully or partially blocked in various federal courts.

One not blocked is now helping streamline the process to make Idaho a disposal site for high level nuclear waste, or as the Department of Energy (DOE) now calls it “used” fuel.

The EO now looking the people of Idaho square in the face was signed on Trump’s first day in office - January 20, 2025.

As the law firm Holland & Knight summarizes:

All federal agency/department heads are ordered to review, revise or rescind existing regulations, orders, policies or any other agency actions that potentially burden the development or use of domestic energy resources “with particular attention to oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, biofuels, critical mineral, and nuclear energy resources.” Agency heads in consultation with the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and National Economic Council (NEC) are instructed to develop and begin implementing action plans to suspend, revise or rescind all agency actions identified as unduly burdensome by Feb. 19, 2025.

You can draw a straight line from this Trump Executive Order, and others relating to energy policy, including gutting the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and a document Idaho’s governor signed late last month. 1

The bottom line for Trump’s nuclear policy: speed rules, public opinion doesn’t matter, care and deliberation are out the window.

Get ready, Idaho.

Making the state a host for high-level waste is just around the corner.

Idaho’s Nuclear Step Backward

On July 24 Governor Brad Little put his signature on one of the most significant, perhaps the most significant, state paper in the history of Idaho.

Little’s action positioning Idaho to become one of the nation’s three new sites for storage of thousands of metric tons of high-level nuclear waste was done with no public announcement, in fact no statement of any kind. While the governor was expressing concern about a mass shooting in Twin Falls and mobilizing the National Guard to fight forest fires, transforming Idaho into a nuclear waste storage site never made it to his social media accounts.

There was no news conference, no celebratory ceremony, no acknowledgment that with the stroke of his slanted signature Little had dramatically and unilaterally altered decades of bipartisan public policy devoted to removing nuclear waste from Idaho.

Little wants new waste and much more waste at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), and his plan is to fast track its acceptance before Idaho voters have a chance to understand what he’s done.

The governor’s vehicle for this profoundly cynical bit of state-level authoritarianism was a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright. The MOU, committing Idaho establishing a Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus (NLIC), is sweeping in scope and stunning in its commitments.

Share

Little’s agreement says, in part, that Idaho will negotiate a “Host” agreement with the Department of Energy (DOE) that “shall provide for the acceptance of out-of-state used nuclear fuel, spent nuclear fuel, and high-level radioactive waste, subject to section 3.6.”

Section 3.6 effectively says Idaho will modify, or more correctly abandon, the 1995 agreement - the Idaho Settlement Agreement - that was hard bargained by then-Republican Governor Phil Batt.

That agreement established legally binding milestones and guarantees that DOE would remove nuclear waste from Idaho that has been stored in the state, in some cases for decades.

The Batt agreement specifically rejected Idaho becoming a waste storage site.

Now Brad Little’s MOU puts Idaho on the record as ready to not only accept vast amounts of new waste from across the country but also eager to squander the legal and moral leverage Batt created nearly 40 years ago that could – until Little’s action – have forced DOE to honor decades of commitments to not make Idaho a waste dump.

In the MOU, Idaho also promises to “process all necessary permits and approvals to support the establishment and operation of the NLIC, including utilities such as electricity and water, as allowed by state and federal law.” And to “ensure that state and local regulatory agencies exercise their regulatory authority in a manner that facilitates the establishment and operation of the NLIC, as allowed by state and federal law.”

Since Little appoints the directors of the state agencies he has committed to processing permits, water rights and exercising regulatory authority that last phrase is mere boilerplate.

The governor is committing Idaho to doing whatever DOE needs or wants in order to facilitate its new waste disposal site. 2

As for the vast economic benefits associated with Idaho, and presumably two other states, agreeing to become waste storage sites the agreement says the MOU “is not a funds obligation document.” The promised economic benefits come with total ambiguity. DOE says to Idaho, as it has since the 1970’s, “trust us,” we’ll work out the details later.

Surely Little and his advisors, including Lt. Governor Scott Bedke and Republican legislative leaders, knew that had they made these commitments in public, with an informed Idaho population knowledgeable about the long-term environmental and legal ramifications, there would have been political hell to pay.

So they have kept their plan on the very low down.

The state’s powerful ruling elites know that a shrunken Idaho press corps and a dispirited political opposition is ill-equipped to shed light on a government operating in the shadows, even when the stakes involve parking more high-level nuclear waste above the Snake River Aquifer, perhaps for a very, very long time.

So far the cynicism about any role for the public in these monumental decisions has been mighty effective, which is why the MOU calls for completion of a “Host Agreement” before September 30.

What you missed in the 2026 Idaho Legislature

The carefully constructed plan quietly bringing Idaho to the brink of nuclear waste importation began to unfold in the late winter in Boise when, largely below the political radar, a state Senate Resolution began to make its way through the overwhelmingly Republican legislature. A resolution is not a law, but rather a statement of policy, a vehicle that normally receives little public attention, and in this case received almost none. Yet the resolution commits the state legislature to what Little has now promised the federal government in his recent MOU.

With the tiny Senate Democratic caucus asleep at the wheel or perhaps hoodwinked by Republican Senator David Lent of Idaho Falls, who sponsored the measure, the Senate by unanimous voice vote, passed the resolution on March 4 setting the stage for Little’s recent waste welcoming MOU.

Lent, by the way, is a former INL employee.

The House consideration on March 17, in a minor sense, had some feel of a genuine public policy debate. Boise Democrat Monica Church – granddaughter of former governor Cecil Andrus and former U.S. senator Frank Church – made an impassioned defense of Batt’s agreement and critiqued the folly of Idaho accepting more waste while the waste DOE promised to clean up years ago remains. Church was the only legislator to speak against the resolution.

The debate of the House Republican sponsor of the “bring the waste” measure, Representative Ted Hill of Eagle, resembled a late-night television info commercial. Hill promised that allowing waste storage in exchange for ill-defined economic benefits would mean many Idahoans would get fabulously rich.

“It’s a fantastic opportunity, I drool on this,” Hill said. “I’m not a nuclear engineer … but we could have a billion dollars a year just by storing it.” “I wish I were younger,” Hill gushed, “because there is going to be some billionaires walking around in Idaho soon, whoever leverages into this opportunity.”

Magical thinking …

This frantic, fantastic scheme of big slogans, unproven technology and unappropriated funding has a Rube Goldberg feel to it, all bells and whistles and devoid of substance.

The whole mess just might – and deserves to – crumble from sheer improbability. But the Idaho Republican Party, from legislature to Congress, has pushed all the state’s chips in on this historic gamble, and without a scintilla of public consideration or any sign of public acceptance.

As my old friend and long-time Idaho journalist Randy Stapilus wrote this week on his Substack:

… if Idaho becomes one of the three “campus” hosts, it will be on the hook for hosting the nation’s nuclear waste. (And we all know how careful the Trump Administration is with handling such sensitive and risky projects.)

They used to say that Idaho is what America was. Today, we might say Idaho isn’t what Idaho was.

Make no mistake Idaho is on the fast track to becoming a massive new nuclear waste storage site. Only a public outcry - as happened in 1995 - will stop this ignorance from changing the state forever.

Leave a comment

While most Americans have been preoccupied with rising food and fuel prices, an ongoing war in the Middle East and the various comings and goings of the Epstein Class, the Trump Administration – and accomplices in a few very Trump friendly states – have been quietly concocting a plan to make three “willing” states home to the vast stockpile of the nation’s high level nuclear waste. 1

The plan, in the works for months, was finally publicly revealed this week by the Department of Energy (DOE), innocuously described as a “Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus.” The “campus” designation is promising billions in pie-in-the-sky economic benefits to states “lucky” enough to be named to the Trump Administration’s short list.

But like all things from this administration the breathless hype conceals an ill-conceived plan, guided by reckless “science” that is more like a blackmail scheme, seeking to entice Idaho - and at least two other states - to accept one-third of the country’s now homeless nuclear waste cache for a “promise” of a big pay day … sometime. 2

Yet as audacious as the Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus plot is – and it is truly and nakedly risky in its ambitions – it is even more outrageous that Idaho’s governor, its U.S. senators, eastern Idaho congressman and most of the state legislature have embraced an Idaho nuclear waste disposal scheme masquerading as an economic windfall. 3

As the Idaho Statesman’s Mark Dee succulently reported this week: “Idaho is on the shortlist to become the center of America’s nuclear energy industry — and a warehouse for much of its radioactive waste.”

One has to be living in the Trump DOE’s house of mirrors not to understand that creating a permanent waste storehouse is vastly more important to the administration and its political cheerleaders than any vague promise that Idaho, or Tennessee, Utah, Oklahoma or Louisiana will reap some huge financial windfall.

Share

Becoming the center of a revitalized nuclear energy industry, an industry most clearly defined not by the jobs, energy or cash it generates but rather by the highly radioactive waste it produces carries an enormous caveat for Idaho – you might get some cash, but you must take the trash.

Idaho’s application for this “windfall,” signed by Governor Brad Little and warmly endorsed by Senators Mike Crapo and Jim Risch, Congressman Mike Simpson and most state legislators – sadly and astoundingly including most of the Democratic leadership – isn’t bashful about just how willing Idaho leaders are to warehouse the nation’s waste.

“Once Congress has acted to address and update the existing legal framework,” the Idaho proposal says, “Idaho is poised to engage in discussions about the eventual siting of a permanent national repository. Idaho intends to collaborate closely with the federal government and neighboring states that are interested in serving as long-term repository locations, ensuring the responsible disposition of waste streams.”

While the Idaho proposal hints that a “permanent” waste repository might be sited in Utah, Idaho’s cheerleaders also say more “temporary” storage in Idaho sounds just fine by them.

“While Idaho will not consider the establishment of a deep geologic repository below the INL site or above the Snake River Plain Aquifer … Idaho is willing to consider additional long-term monitored storage solutions for the DOE, possibly including deep bore hole storage, in exchange for significant financial consideration in anticipation of development of a recycling and reprocessing (R&R) capability near the INL site.” 4

Not Idaho’s first rodeo

Perhaps some of you are old enough to remember that Idaho has been here before.

From the early 1970’s to the end of the 1990’s Idaho governors of both parties resisted repeated federal efforts to turn Idaho into what former Democratic Governor Cecil Andrus called the nation’s “de facto nuclear waste dump.” When Andrus became governor in 1971 the state had been quietly serving for decades as a convenient “out of sight, out of mind” location for “temporary” waste storage. Andrus famously closed the state’s borders to additional waste in 1988 when he became frustrated by DOE’s lies and incompetence in addressing waste issues, including failure to create a plan to clean up and remove waste already sitting in Idaho.

Andrus’s successor, Republican Phil Batt, carried the fight forward and secured a landmark agreement sharply restricting movement of new waste into Idaho and proscribing how existing waste would be treated and removed.

Both Batt and Andrus shamed their critics, including many Republican politicians and deep pocketed industry concerns, into submission because they were right on both the policy and the politics.

Survey after survey over decades have shown that the state’s fight to avoid becoming a nuclear waste dump has enjoyed widespread public support. Batt’s agreement was immensely popular in part because the feisty, no-nonsense governor effectively told DOE to clean up its old mess and stop making a bigger mess in the future.

Now Idaho’s nuclear waste dump application clearly envisions junking Batt’s 1995 agreement, saying “future modifications will be discussed when relevant and appropriate.”

In other words, Little and the state’s political elite are poised to tear up Batt’s agreement and decades of bipartisan resolve, and for what? A promise to welcome more than 30,000 metric tons of the most dangerous material on the planet for at least “temporary” storage above the Snake River Aquifer in southeastern Idaho?

To make sure the Trump Administration understands how completely prepared Idaho is to become a waste disposal site, Little’s proposal underscores that “Idaho is actively reforming its internal codes to consolidate authority and simplify the pathway for complex nuclear and hazardous waste facilities.”

In other words, we won’t bother with any public process around this wonderful scheme. We’ll short circuit any safeguards and make sure the decision-making is “consolidated.”

This fantastic scheme, like all things emanating from this administration, is full of bluster, wild promises, scientific and regulatory shortcuts (or abandonment) and utter disregard for basic common sense. If you think all this blue smoke is good for Idaho then you’ll probably making a killing trading Trump crypto currency. 5

Here’s the bottom line: American needs safe, reliable nuclear energy, and the industry needs a safe, scientifically sound basis for dealing with the vast waste stockpile that exists and that will only grow in the future.

Instead the Trump Administration has produced a jerry rigged, phantom economic development concept that is really just a plea to states like Idaho to take some garbage “temporarily,” while we kick the waste can down the road to places like Butte County, Idaho.

If this were a nuclear waste version of “The Apprentice,” the Idaho politicians endorsing this nonsense would be fired since they clearly have no idea what they are doing.

Leave a comment

It’s not like this in many other western democracies.

Canada, for instance, has five parties and a couple of independents represented in the national legislature. Britain has 15 parties represented in its House of Commons. Some of these parties are tiny or tied primarily to regional issues, but each party has a following and at least some ability to affect national policy.

Yet even with many choices when it comes to voting, many Canadians and Brits practice what political scientists call “strategic voting,” a calculated effort to make sure your individual vote supports a candidate who may not be your ideal choice but is closer to ideal than any alternative, and with a legitimate chance to prevail at the ballot box.

Maybe this is just the ‘lesser of two evils’ as political theory, but strategic voting can be remarkably effective if voters are willing to consider candidates beyond party label.

The strategic approach to casting a ballot goes a long way to explain why Mark Carney, the leader of the Canadian Liberal Party, is currently the very popular prime minister. And Canada is a case study for the proposition that if enough voters think strategically rather than tribally about an election, we have a chance to change our politics for the better.

In Canada in 2025 the national election was dominated by threats to national sovereignty, security and trade by the erratic and untrustworthy American president. Many Canadian voters saw Donald Trump as an existential threat to their nation and voted strategically for the candidate, in many cases despite their party identification, who seemed most able to take on Trump.

The strategic voting approach boosted Carney who won votes from Canadians who often cast their ballots for the left of center New Democratic Party (NDP) or the Bloc Québécois, the regional separatist party in Quebec.

Share

As four Canadian political scientists wrote in the online journal The Conversation on the first anniversary of Carney’s election: “Instead of evaluating parties along familiar ideological lines, many Canadians approached the election as a question of who could best protect the country during an unusually turbulent moment. It seems that a year later, Canadian voters are still regarding the Liberals in this light.”

Had those Canadians given in to purely party considerations it’s a good bet Canada would have a conservative Trumpist prime minister rather than the prime minister they have who has quickly become an outsized actor on the world stage due to his calm and sure leadership.

There is a lesson here, perhaps more than one, for voters this fall.

The biggest battle in American politics this year is control of the United States Senate, and it is in the Senate that the idea of strategic voting could have a major impact.

An analysis from Newsweek found more than 200 independent candidates are on the ballot in the 2026 cycle, including 47 Senate hopefuls. Most of these Senate candidates are simply not competitive, but a number of independents seem to be seriously contesting races in Idaho, Montana, Nebraska and South Dakota of particular note.

In each of these states the Democrat brand is in tatters, but it’s also clear that many voters, if not the hardcore Trumpian base of the GOP, are profoundly disappointed in both parties.

“The Republicans are definitely dragged down this year by Trump’s unpopularity, which helps the Democrats,” Michael S. Kang, a professor covering voting rights at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law in Chicago, told Newsweek. “But the Democratic brand is still not very strong either. So there’s opportunity perhaps for independent candidates to separate themselves from both and attract voters who aren’t excited about either major party right now.”

This is happening in Montana where a young independent candidate, Seth Bodner, the former president of the University of Montana, is snagging endorsements and money against a Republican who was anointed in a blatantly corrupt scheme to deny voters a primary election and a Democrat who is going nowhere fast. The brutal political logic is clear in this race: if most Democrats stick with their doomed candidate another lackluster and already tainted Republican will win. 1

The same logic applies in Idaho where James Risch, a historically unpopular politician, who at age 83 is seeking another term in the Senate and is clearly vulnerable, but not in a three-way race.

Risch is the very definition of a career politician, in public office almost nonstop since 1970. His record of legislative accomplishment would comfortably fit on a matchbook. Given his disappearing act during wars in Ukraine and Iran and attacks on NATO – you wouldn’t know by any action by him, but Risch chairs the Foreign Relations Committee – he has abandoned any notion of influencing U.S. foreign policy.

Risch is also embracing Trump’s damaging tariffs and gruesome cuts to Medicaid, while tolerating Justice Department stonewalling on the Epstein files. This should make him genuinely vulnerable, and he is.

Risch lost the only serious campaigns in his long and not illustrious career, twice beaten in state legislative races when he was merely arrogant and self-assured on a local level. Now he’s a big wheel, at least in his own mind, in the Senate. But Risch is running a campaign full of fluff that looks like he’s still hankering for a state senate in Ada County.

In short he is scared and knows he’s well past his sell by date.

Risch’s opponent, Todd Achilles, is the independent candidate, a veteran, decades younger than the senator and a guy going everywhere and anywhere in Idaho to talk to voters about serious issues. Risch hasn’t done a public town hall since Donald Trump was bankrupting a casino.

But like the Montana situation, in a three-way race a Republican wins in Idaho, even a pandering lightweight like Risch.

Most voters are smart enough to figure out that the independents in these races are the change makers, the anti-elites that will begin to return the Senate to what it ought to be, which is not a retirement home for used up politicians.

But if Democratic candidates in Montana and Idaho continue to make these three-way races, Republicans win, while the Democratic Party, never known for thinking strategically, loses again.

So it’s likely up to voters to do the strategic thinking in November, that is unless they long to double down on the chaos, incompetence and corruption that hangs over Washington, DC like a death shroud.

Leave a comment

This is as good a day as any, and perhaps better than most, to remember and reflect upon what Abraham Lincoln said about his country and its Declaration of Independence.

“I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence,” Lincoln told an impromptu crowd gathered at Independence Hall where the Declaration had been adopted on July 4, 1776.

“I have often pondered over the dangers which were incurred by the men who assembled here, and framed and adopted that Declaration of Independence. I have pondered over the toils that were endured by the officers and soldiers of the army who achieved that Independence. I have often inquired of myself, what great principle or idea it was that kept this Confederacy so long together. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the Colonies from the motherland; but that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but, I hope, to the world, for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men. This is a sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence. Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis?”

Lincoln was not sure that this country could be saved.

Share

By the time he spoke in Philadelphia seven southern states had decided they would secede from the Union primarily because a northerner opposed to expanding slavery into American territories and future states had been elected president. These southerners said they were leaving, and risking a civil war, to preserve a southern way of life. But that was euphemistic language to dress up their real fear – that slavery was, sooner or later, coming to an end.

These insurrectionists held a dim view of the Declaration’s commitment to equality and liberty for all, but they comfortably invoked “the Right of the People to alter or to abolish” a government that they found oppressive or simply not to their liking.

This is just one of the more obvious contradictions in the Declaration: is the commitment to equality the document’s important part or is the rejection of a government one finds objectionable the critical point? This question, as vital today perhaps as it was in 1776 or 1861, is at the center of a debate that has animated American politics since the beginning.

As the historian Robert Kagan has written:

“… large numbers of Americans have always rejected the founders’ claim that all men are created equal, with ‘unalienable” rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and they have persistently struggled against the imposition of those liberal values on their lives.”

These Americans, Kagan says, desire to:

“preserve a white, Christian supremacy, contrary to the founders’ vision, and they have tolerated the founders’ liberalism, and the workings of a democratic system, only when it has not undermined that cause. When it has, they have repeatedly rebelled against it.”

Our Civil War was fought over this fundamental question.

The Ku Klux Klan made us reckon with it repeatedly. Those who opposed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in the 1960’s were rebelling against the founders’ notions of liberty and equality.

An American president today targets Blacks, immigrants and asylum seekers from what he calls “shit hole” countries, while playing off easily exploited fears of “other” people with a different skin color, a different sexual orientation or a language or a religion we don’t understand and therefore dislike.

Many of these Americans, like the Americans of Lincoln’s time who yearned for a dissolved union even if it meant war against their fellow countrymen, seem to have given up on democracy, the very idea that the Great Emancipator celebrated in his rightfully famous Gettysburg Address in 1863.

Most of us remember how that short speech began:

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Lincoln, properly in my view, saw our Declaration as the foundational, aspirational expression of a new nation fashioned around radical, revolutionary ideals. The Constitution by contrast, while creating a brilliant political structure, was crafted around awkward compromises and expedient tradeoffs that continue to befuddle us today.

The Constitution, as we saw again this week before the Supreme Court, is also a profoundly political document originally designed to placate those Americans who fundamentally rejected the liberalism of the Declaration.

Little wonder we still argue about these founding documents, in part because we have never permanently resolved the contradictions they contain.

Does being an American really mean we endorse equal rights and the many benefits of democracy for every person? Or does being a citizen mean we can pick and choose from a buffet of beliefs that best suit us, favor our ethnicity and religion and confirm our biases about fellow humans who are “different?”

The enduring importance of our 250 year old document is contained in its aspirations, as radical in July of 1776 as they are today. It doesn’t grant any rights, but it promises a system – a way of thinking about a diverse democratic nation – that is based on equality and liberty.

But the Declaration, as Lincoln knew in 1863, was only as good as the citizens who embraced the difficult work, requiring individual commitment and restraint, of building and sustaining a democracy.

In their time the founders knew that no democracy had ever lasted very long, and certainly never for 250 years, and they would likely not be surprised that we’re still struggling with what it means to be an American, living and participating in a complicated democracy, not always – or perhaps ever – working perfectly.

By invoking the promise of the Declaration after the bloody battle at Gettysburg, Lincoln expressed his hope that those who died defending their democracy had not died in vain, and that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Would that all Americans embrace that notion in our troubled, divided 250^th year.

We live with the reality that many of us don’t.

Leave a comment

About me: I am a Nebraska native, grew up in South Dakota and migrated in Idaho after college to work in broadcast journalism. In 1986, I joined the “comeback” campaign of a legendary Idaho political figure – Cecil D. Andrus – who eventually served four terms as governor and four years as Secretary of the Interior, not bad for a Democrat in a very conservative state. I had a small role in helping Cece Andrus win his last two gubernatorial terms. I did communication and crisis consulting work, and since “retiring” to the beautiful north coast of Oregon have written three books on U.S. Senate history. I’m working on a new book on another legend – this one a legend in journalism.

You can find my books here:

I write this Substack to scratch my itch to connect history with current politics. I hope, in some small way, to contribute to understanding of this perilous moment for our democracy, for free speech and facts.

But I’m with the writer Jonathan V. Last who wrote today that the birthday feels more like a vigil than a celebration.

A historic ten days

I’ve long been struck by the number of profound events that have occurred in the early days of July over the past two plus centuries - the Declaration, obviously, and the death exactly 50 years to the day after the Declaration was signed of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.

The Constitution was ratified on July 2, 1788.

The 14th Amendment was ratified on July 9, 1868

President James Garfield was shot on July 2, 1881. Garfield’s eventual death removed from American politics a president who, had he lived, might have been one of the great ones. Who knows?

The Battle of the Somme during World War I began on July 1, 1916 and the British Army suffered 57,000 casualties on the first day of that awful battle that eventually claimed a 1,000,000 casualties. The United States was not yet involved in that war but the carnage in northern France seemed to foreshadow that eventually it would be.

Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act on July 2, 1964.

Share

And 163 years ago today, across wide, slightly uphill undulating ground and into the maw of massed Union artillery Major General George Pickett’s division stepped forward to the high water mark of the rebellion of the American South.

Pickett’s charge on the third day at Gettysburg - July 3, 1863 - was as the great historian James McPherson wrote:

… a magnificent mile-wide spectacle, a a picture-book view of the war that participants on both sides remembered with awe until their dying moment - which for many came within the next hour. Pickett’s charge represented the Confederate war effort in microcosm: matchless valor, apparent initial success, and ultimate disaster.

… of the 14,000 Confederates who had gone forward, scarcely half returned. Pickett’s own division lost two-thirds of its men; his three brigadiers and all thirteen colonels were killed or wounded.

The reckless disaster signaled the beginning of the end - at least the end of the combat - of our Civil War.

I write this not to celebrate the insurrectionists of the Civil War as too many Americans continue to do, but to underscore the meaning of that great and terrible battle. As Abraham Lincoln said a few months later at the dedication of the cemetery where many of the Gettysburg dead lie buried, the sacrifice of those protecting our Union on that hot July afternoon could give the nation “a new birth of freedom.”

It was an optimistic hope.

William Faulkner, born and bred a southerner, offered what is perhaps a less optimistic lesson from that afternoon in early July 1863:

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose than all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago.

And on July 4, 1863 - the day after the Union guns stopped Pickett’s division in Pennsylvania - the Confederate garrison at Vicksburg, Mississippi surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant.

Nearly two more years of hard and deadly fighting continued before the South surrendered its armies.

And then almost immediately new fights commenced - fights over race and state’s power and citizenship and the very meaning of the Civil War carnage - that continue to this day.

Our Civil War became our war that never really ended.

Tomorrow we celebrate the document that claimed “all men are created equal.” But many Americans seem ready anew to challenge that very idea.

A celebration or a vigil at 250?

Too early to tell?

Leave a comment

I have never lived in the City by the Bay, however I’ve visited many times and came to love the place. My own affection certainly dates to the great Giant Willie Mays whose picture - thanks to a fellow fan and friend - graces my office wall.

Mays, McCovey, Cepeda, Marichal, all in the Hall of Fame along with Giants that came before my fandom - Mel Ott, The Great Mathewson, the Fordham Flash Frankie Frisch (before he became a Cardinal). Even the controversial Bonds. Damn him. What a player.

More recently my regard centered on great Giants like Matt Williams and Will “The Thrill’ Clark and the perpetually grumpy Madison Bumgarner - Mad Bum. And, of course, the almost certain future Hall of Famer, Buster Posey.

But now, in a way that only a true love can hurt you, my Giants have hurt me, and themselves and their great city.

On so many levels the mangling by Giants owners and management of a four player protest of Pride Night earlier this month was an own goal of stupidity, arrogance, gutlessness, fear and did I mention stupidity.

I’ve been mulling this mess and my team for two weeks now and I’m still pissed.

From icons to cowards

If you’re not a baseball fan or otherwise missed this story of stupidity and fear here are the relevant details:

• The Giants organization has celebrated Pride Night for more than 20 years and beginning in 2021 the team has worn special game caps with a rainbow logo.

• The Giants organization has been baseball’s leader in raising awareness of HIV/Aids and then raising money to fight the awful disease. They raise money for prostate cancer research, too, among other worthy community causes.

• Not surprisingly the city’s large LGBTQ population embraced the Pride celebration and embraced the team and organization in the process.

• This year the Giants marketed the event as Pride Night at Oracle Park featuring postgame fireworks and music from LGBTQ artists. There was a corporate sponsor for the events.

• Three Giants pitchers - Landen Roupp, JT Brubaker, and Ryan Walker - thought it an appropriate occasion to inscribe a Bible verse on those Pride caps in protest of the team’s celebration of inclusiveness. A fourth pitcher, Sam Hentges, just refused to wear the Pride cap. All these guys are very well compensated, comfortable, privileged white males who claim to be Christians in that curious way that empowers true believers to shun or belittle those they deem less worthy.

• The protesting players mumbled something about not believing in Pride Night (or the humanity of gay Americans), or disagreeing with something or other, but definitely not “hating.” Or, as Walker said of his protest, it was about putting “Jesus over baseball,” but apparently only when Jesus can be invoked to disrespect gay baseball fans.

• Major League Baseball admonished the players, but did not levy fines for violating a rule negotiated by players and owners that prohibits personal messages on a uniform.

• The Trump Justice Department jumped into the fray - of course they did - saying there would be an investigation of whether the player’s religious freedom was somehow violated.

• Giants management effectively did nothing, well nothing but dink off a sizable portion of the fan base, while looking like the newly fashioned San Francisco Pygmies.

  Share

Here’s the great sportswriter Howard Bryant:

What remains of the Giants is embodied by their owner, Charles Johnson, the 93-year-old shadow power behind right-wing politics and causes. The players in protest reflect their owner and not their city, and the face of the front office – Buster Posey – was supposed to represent the best of the franchise: a three-time World Series champion, Giants icon as a player, fan favorite and trusted hope to turn around a club that has failed in recent years after winning a franchise-record 107 games in 2021. He didn’t.

Facing a suddenly energized San Francisco media demanding answers for its city on Tuesday, the baby-faced Posey looked small and distant, surprisingly in a place but not of the place whose fans once adorned his jersey more than any other. Posey sat in the dugout annoyed, clinging stubbornly to the line that he would only answer “baseball questions”. When that did not end the questioning, he waited, childlike, to be rescued meekly by his public relations department, the supposed leader unable to lead for himself. Posey didn’t even know how to say the right things to the city on behalf of the franchise, even if they did not suit his personal values – which is more often than not half of the job.

The video of Posey evading questions about this fiasco is truly painful to watch. It feels sort of like what I imagine fouling a ball off your instep feels like, except doing it five or six times in a row.

Posey is also struggling through a throughly disastrous season that he is almost exclusively responsible for, making his awful showing with the San Francisco press somehow even worse, so enter Giants CEO Larry Baer on a clean up mission that just made things worse:

“Yes we’ve learned a lot in the last 11 days. Yes we could have handled things better this year for sure. We’re absolutely committed to continuing our conversations with members of the LGBTQ+ community going forward.

“I wanted to deliver that message to the fans and move on, and be able to talk about some other things.”

Continuing our conversations.

Talk about some other things.

Maybe like a 33-48 record?

Or a conversation about bigotry in a ball cap?

Even discussing the team’s dismal record is apparently preferable to an apology or even an explanation as to how a two decade old gay pride celebration, in one of America’s most diverse and welcoming cities, got hijacked by four baseball playing (if you can call it that) homophobes.

Trumpification

I suspect most of us know what is really going on here. The Trumpification of every freaking thing in our country and our culture.

The Giants principal owner is a huge Trump supporter, and a 93-year old billionaire. The Trump Justice Department threatens Major League Baseball and indirectly the team with an investigation. Buster Posey goes all lockjaw amid speculation that he was told to pull a Sargent Schultz and “know nothing, nothing” about anything, anything.

As one fan told the San Francisco Standard:

“I never had any illusions that professional athletes shared my politics. Baseball is an escape, and then here’s the culture war right here,” he said, adding it was “MAGA creeping into my baseball team.”

A several billion dollar enterprise, as the Giants are, one of the biggest brands in professional sports, turn out to be as gutless as white shoe New York law firms or an Ivy League university or a Silicon Valley tech bro or a Republican United States senator.

Some will dismiss a protest against inclusiveness as just another senseless chapter in our endless “cultural wars,” and the apparent endless need for some “Christians” to proselytize about what they are against. But this protest was designed to signal some personal virtue and it screams “I’m better” than the “other” person that I’m against.

And the team response was simply to give in to such bullying and, yes, to hate.

This is who we have become.

And, damn it, people with billion dollar platforms need to stop being such fearful, spineless fools. Act like you can face a 95 mile an hour fastball rather than cower in a corner of the dugout.

Here’s a real message

I spent a lot of years in the crisis management business advising clients on what to say and how to act when the pressure is on. Buster Posey, Larry Baer, the rookie manager Tony Vitello, indeed the Giants organization from bottom to top fouled off every possible PR rule and in the process crushed the brand.

Here’s what they might have said had the team the character I once proudly valued in the organization:

The player protest of Pride Night was totally inappropriate, an insult to our fans, our city and ultimately to their teammates. We say without equivocation these players do not represent the San Francisco Giants. And on behalf of the organization we apologize.

While we respect the player’s right to their individual religious beliefs, the Giants organization does not equate a violation of uniform rules with religious beliefs, but rather as a statement of disrespect for thousands of our friends and neighbors.

The player’s actions were clearly aimed at one segment of our community, a group historically discriminated against, marginalized and hurt. We deeply regret that this harmful message was sent and we have conveyed in direct and impossible to misunderstand language that the players should apologize to our fans, our city and their teammates.

It is worth noting that the San Francisco Giants have long supported and celebrated other important members of the community with events like Fiesta Gigantes Saturday and heritage theme nights for our Filipino and Aloha communities. The Giants would not tolerate a protest aimed at these communities just as we will not tolerate disrespect and intolerance directed at Pride Night and those who celebrate it.

That such a statement was not made tells us all about character … and fear.

And you know what.

With this administration we’re not that far away from someone protesting Jackie Robinson Day - Trump’s Defense Department already tried to erase Robinson’s military service - or protesting Rafael Devers for being a Dominican.

The hell with the U.S. Justice Department.

If you can’t tell those hateful clowns to buzz off in this stupid circumstance how can you consider yourself anything but a timid, fearful co-conspirator enabling just more and more authoritarian demagoguery?

I’m left steaming

I hoping my team will grow a backbone, but doubt they will. This is who they have become.

So let me suggest a new team motto for the guys who play at Oracle Park, a baseball palace named for the firm owned by the guy who bankrolled the deal that is destroying CBS News, while also paying out millions to further the corrupt, malevolent rule of our Mango Mussolini.

The new motto might be the last line of Mark Harris’s classic 1956 novel Bang the Drum Slowly.

The narrator of the novel, Henry “Author” Wiggen, a pitcher, watches during the season as his teammates belittle and humiliate a second string catcher, Bruce Pearson - masterfully played in the film adaptation by Robert De Niro - without knowing that Bruce is dealing with a fatal illness.

Wiggen observes all the meanness and lack of empathy for a guy not quite up to the rough and tumble of a baseball field or the nastiness of a clubhouse, and in the last line of the book he says:

“From here on in I rag nobody.”

The Giants ought to frame that quote and hang it in their clubhouse.

Leave a comment

Working together as genuine colleagues and friends - think about that in the context of John Thune and Chuck Schumer in today’s Senate - Mansfield and Dirksen (with lots of help) drafted the civil rights legislation, whipped the votes, humored the president, defeated what is still the longest filibuster in Senate history and changed the nation.

As I wrote in my study of the Senate leadership of Mansfield and Dirksen in the 1960’s:

When the Civil Rights Act arrived in the Senate on February 17, 1964, having passed the House a week before, Mansfield was ready. Despite his frequent claim that he was no expert in the Senate’s complicated, often arcane rules, Mansfield had meticulously worked out his strategy to advance the civil rights legislation, knowing full well that Dick Russell, the wily leader of the segregationist bloc of southern Democrats was also ready. From his earliest days in the Senate in the 1930’s, Russell had been an expert parliamentarian. As his biographer wrote, Russell “believed that knowledge was power and set out to learn the minutest details about the Senate’s rules, procedures, and traditions.” Additionally, Russell’s principal southern allies, including James Eastland and John Stennis of Mississippi, Lister Hill of Alabama, and Allen Ellender of Louisiana, were skilled in the ways of the Senate, and particularly in the use of the filibuster. As Clay Risen has noted, “like the Confederacy during the Civil War” Russell and his troops “did not have to defeat their opponents outright, they just needed to draw out the fight long enough that the other side gave up.” Mansfield and his allies, eventually including Dirksen, had to meet and overcome this powerful combination of Senate experience and intransigence, and because of Mansfield’s commitment to openness and candor, do so without tricks, subterfuge, or misdirection. Success would require the skills of a juggler, the patience of a saint, and the stamina of a long-distance runner.[i]

It’s possible today to view Mansfield’s approach to political leadership as hopelessly antiquated as a Model T Ford in the age of the drone.

But I think of his approach to leadership as not only brilliant, but in the context of how the United States Senate is structured, as being absolutely necessary.

By displaying the character of a servant leader, facilitating, encouraging, insisting upon fair play and candor, Mansfield made the Senate - and senators - better than they were.

And it came with some major pushback that sounds all too familiar:

Mansfield was … hearing from his voters. A Eureka, Montana, constituent wrote, “It is my firm conviction that the Civil Rights Bill is a radical, unconstitutional and thoroughly unacceptable proposal, in that it will destroy the basic rights of all individuals through federal intervention.” A couple from Billings told Mansfield, “Individual freedoms cannot be removed, either collectively or one at a time, without leading us along the road to socialism which will enslave us all, black and white alike.” In what was clearly a coordinated lobbying effort, several letters to Mansfield in early 1964 used the same language: “The Civil Rights Bill before the Senate now, is 10% civil rights and 90% take-over of all activities of life.”

Always attuned to home-state sensibilities, Mansfield prepared a summary of the bill, “The Civil Rights Bill and Montana.” Not altogether correctly, this summary dismissed the legislation’s impact on Montana “because in the first instance there is no problem of discrimination in Montana.”

Seemingly immune to criticism of his strategy and undeterred by the widespread skepticism about the likelihood of success, Mansfield pressed on, systematically clearing the Senate calendar of pending business. Ignoring advice from President Johnson that he immediately take up the civil rights bill, he kept everyone talking about the path forward, encouraging and facilitating working groups that included attorney general Robert Kennedy and his staff, Republicans, and [Hubert] Humphrey and his team. He maintained a laser-like focus on Dirksen and those Republicans the minority leader could influence, knowing that without Dirksen’s eventual active engagement he could not create a sufficiently large bipartisan coalition to defeat a filibuster; and he refused Johnson’s advice to keep the Senate in round-the-clock session as a tactic to wear down Russell and his troops.

“I am not going to turn the Senate into a circus,” Mansfield said when challenged about his rejection of all-night or even late-night sessions. The dignity and respectability of the Senate would be tarnished by news accounts of elderly, unshaven senators padding about in bedroom slippers, napping on cots in the cloakroom, or answering quorum calls in their pajamas. “He just thought it was senseless to do it,” Charles Ferris [a top Mansfield aide] remembered of the demand for around-the-clock sessions, “and ineffective in passing the legislation. There is a natural rhythm to an event of this magnitude and the all-night sessions would have worked against the passage of the strongest bill possible. It also demeaned the dignity of the Senate.”

I really love this little detail:

At the precise moment the Senate finally agreed to move to consideration of the civil rights bill, the nation’s two most prominent Black leaders were watching from separate parts of the gallery. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, the activist and Muslim minister, later held separate news conferences. As the Detroit Free Press reported, “The two Negroes differed both on their goals and on the means to achieve them. About the only thing they had in common was a desire to see the civil rights bill passed.” King had words of praise for President Johnson and “courageous” senators in both parties who supported the legislation, while “Malcolm issued a thinly veiled threat to Mr. Johnson by warning that Negroes may abstain from voting in the presidential election this November” if there was no action on civil rights. The two men were captured in a photo awkwardly shaking hands, with Malcolm wisecracking to King, “now you’re going to get investigated.”

Share

The southern filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 lasted for 60 working days, but the filibuster was finally broken on June 10 and the Senate moved to actually debating the historic legislation, eventually passing the bill nine days later - June 19, 1964:

While the praise rained down on Dirksen and columnists assessed the historic importance of the Senate action on a civil rights bill, Mansfield continued to act in a manner that he hoped his colleagues would emulate. He wrote a thank-you letter to every senator.

“We have come through a most trying period in the Senate. In retrospect, the issues were such that they might have opened schisms which would have been years in closing. That did not happen, and I want you to know how grateful I am for the help, the understanding and the cooperation which you gave to me in striving to prevent it.

“The character of the Senate’s handling of this issue, I believe, will mean a great deal to the nation. I know that it meant a great deal to me personally. Members, regardless of views on the substance of the measure, treated me with the utmost kindness and consideration and I am deeply appreciative.”

Some coincidence

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on June 19 created a remarkably historic “coincidence,” or perhaps proof that the stars occasionally do align.

June 19 is also the date in 1862 that President Abraham Lincoln signed legislation prohibiting slavery in U.S. territories.

And June 19 is celebrated today as Juneteenth, the day:

… some 2,000 Union troops arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas [in 1865]. The army announced that the more than 250,000 enslaved black people in the state, were free by executive decree. This day came to be known as "Juneteenth," by the newly freed people in Texas.

The long American struggle to live up to the promise of the Declaration of Independence - “that all men are created equal” - has often been a two steps forward, one back reality.

We seem to be stepping back right now, but June 19 with all of its significance should be a reminder that while genuine political and social progress is often slow, progress can come when real leaders strive greatly to do vitally important things.

We celebrate Juneteenth 1865 as a milestone ending the original American curse of slavery. The Civil Rights Act, passed 99 years later, was a political and social affirmation that the self evident truths of equality never just spontaneously happen. They are made to happen.

Thanks for reading.

My book Mansfield and Dirksen: Bipartisan Giants of the Senate will be out in paperback in late October.

About me: I am a Nebraska native, grew up in South Dakota and migrated in Idaho after college to work in broadcast journalism. In 1986, I joined the “comeback” campaign of a legendary Idaho political figure – Cecil D. Andrus – who eventually served four terms as governor and four years as Secretary of the Interior, not bad for a Democrat in a very conservative state. I had a small role in helping Cece Andrus win his last two gubernatorial terms. I did communication and crisis consulting work, and since “retiring” to the beautiful north coast of Oregon have written three books on U.S. Senate history. I’m working on a new book on another legend – this one a legend in journalism.

You can find my books here:

I write this Substack to scratch my itch to connect history with current politics. I hope, in some small way, to contribute to understanding of this perilous moment for our democracy, for free speech and facts.

Here’s what Psychology Today says about this phenomenon:

What Is Projection?

Unconscious discomfort can lead people to attribute unacceptable feelings or impulses to someone else to avoid confronting them. Projection allows the difficult trait to be addressed without the individual fully recognizing it in themselves.

Why do people project?

People tend to project because they have a trait or desire that is too difficult to acknowledge. Rather than confronting it, they cast it away and onto someone else. This functions to preserve their self-esteem, making difficult emotions more tolerable. It’s easier to attack or witness wrongdoing in another person than confront that possibility in one’s own behavior. How a person acts toward the target of projection might reflect how they really feel about themselves.

Case in point:

“The deal with Iran will go down as one of the most incompetent ever made. The U.S. lost on virtually every point. We just don’t win anymore!”

— President Trump, on Twitter in 2015.

Subscribe now

Now, by every credible account I have been able to identify, the “deal” that Donald Trump, JD Vance and the cast of incompetent American “negotiators” reached with Iran is, as Louisiana Republican Senator Bill Cassidy said today, a blunder of historic dimensions:

Every American should remember that Trump tore up the comprehensive, multi-national Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated in 2015 during the Obama Administration. Republican members of Congress generally applauded the cancellation and Trump has repeatedly criticized Obama for “giving” Iran $2 billion (of its own money) as part of the agreement.

The JCPOA required international inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities, and while some terms and the duration of the agreement were criticized, it was - and remains - a whole lot different (and vastly better) than the flimsy MOU that will be hashed over in detail in the days ahead.

From a Wall Street Journal editorial:

“President Trump is touting his latest cease-fire deal with Iran as peace in our time, but the world is more likely to see it as a strategic retreat short of achieving his war aims. To reopen the Strait of Hormuz, Mr. Trump is accepting Iran’s promises merely to negotiate over its nuclear program…”

“Those who say Mr. Trump had no alternative to this retreat ignore that the U.S. blockade was squeezing Iran more by the day, while Iran’s blockade was leaking. Mr. Trump simply didn’t want to endure higher oil prices for longer. This is his choice, not a strategic imperative…”

“Iran’s new leaders are likely to conclude that Mr. Trump has no desire for more conflict, and they will negotiate accordingly.”

And here is military historian Phillips P. O’Brien, a keen observer of the remarkably rapid decline of American world standing under Donald Trump:

In the near future, the US is pledging to help organize a massive reparations program for Iran, to pull back American forces from the vicinity of Iran, to end all sanctions on Iran, and to pledge its commitment to all of this with a UN Security Council Resolution.

And what has the US gotten in return?

Well, it has gotten a temporary reopening of the Strait of Hormuz (under significantly worse conditions than existed on February 27, 2026) and a restatement of a nuclear pledge that Iran has made for years and years.

It is hard to grasp just how humiliating this is for the USA (and Israel). They chose to start this war after great preparation, they used their most advanced technology, and they used up massive military stocks in bombing Iran for six weeks.

And they are in a much worse situation.

If you want more on the historically bad deal I suggest reading all of Professor O’Brien’s analysis. You may be as stunned as I am by what the American president has wrought here.

A madman in his dotage

I have written before, and continue to believe, that when the end of Trumpism comes - and it will come - the effect will be something like the political equivalent of an Elon Musk rocket blowing up at launch. The explosion will be horrific and the debris will fall far and wide.

The end, after all these years of chaos, incompetence, bad faith and rank stupidity, will be rapid and despite all the available evidence all the time it will be shocking to many.

As Peter Wehner writes in The Atlantic:

Jonathan Rauch and I have argued that, as a result, the world now faces something new and frightening: a psychotic state. The administration is consistently detached from reality; the normal policy process we have seen in past administrations is nonexistent in this one. No one around the president even hints that anything he does is inappropriate, unpopular, or unwise. His Cabinet meetings have become exercises in self-abasement, with one member after another obsequiously groveling, each trying to outdo the next in their adoration. Trump, left on his own without adult supervision, has lurched from blunder to catastrophe.

We will live with the consequences for decades to come.

Congressional Republicans and the most feckless in MAGA World will almost certainly find a way to act as though the Iranian fiasco and all the rest is all well within the bounds normal behavior. It is not.

Never forget who had done this. Don’t fall, for even a millisecond, for the gaslighting that will come in the next hours and days.

Remind yourself of an infamous photo from history.

Leave a comment

The New York Times reports Trump is “really uncomfortable” with aging.

You don’t say:

As President Trump turns 80 on Sunday, he is so intent on projecting an image of relentless energy that he has installed a massive, mixed martial arts octagon on the South Lawn to mark the occasion. After watching the fight, Mr. Trump will depart Washington in the middle of the night and cross an ocean for a diplomatic summit in France. It is a schedule that seems devised to ward off questions about age and stamina as he begins his ninth decade.

But even for a president known for imposing his own reality on every situation, Mr. Trump is facing scrutiny over his age that has grown more intense with each passing year. A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken in February showed that nearly six in 10 Americans think Mr. Trump is growing more erratic.

Growing? I’d say arrived.

What says America more than gladiators beating on each other on the south lawn of the White House? I mean, come on, let’s Make America Great Again.

And who wouldn’t want to celebrate a round number birthday cosplaying Caligula, while desecrating the Executive Mansion?

But what else can you really say about an erratic 80-year old malignant narcissist? Seems we have known it all for a long time now.

Well, you can say that the cage fighters will be paid in Trump crypto currency, which is to say they won’t be paid.

The whole deal - the gross spectacle, the absurd tackiness, the grifting, the manosphere violence - is so completely on brand for the Orange Man. As is the forecast for high winds, rain and lightening in the District of Columbia. Stands to be a lovely night with fireworks crashing over our nation’s capital at 11:30 pm Eastern time.

And the Iran deal, if it ever happens, will turn out to be a massive defeat for the country’s credibility and the world economy. Trump will, of course, claim a historic victory for himself. It won’t be that, but on cue, most of the Republican Party will descend into a crazy rabbit hole of praise for what is likely the greatest foreign policy setback since Mission Accomplished, or the fall of Saigon.

But let’s not dwell on the negative.

Share

Our demagogue in decline

His name came down from the Kennedy Center. The National Mall reflecting pool was “rehabilitated” using excessive no bid contracts that Trump engineered, and then almost immediately the green algae returned. A federal judge issued a permanent ban on his “slush fund” to reward, among others, January 6 insurrectionists. The Trump Arch is getting all the pushback it richly deserves.

And … the Knicks won the NBA championship despite apparently Trump falling asleep during a game at Madison Square Garden - who could sleep through that noise - while snoringly invoking his evil karma that was clearly strong enough to keep the New Yorkers from sweeping the Spurs.

It’s been said every thing Trump touches dies. Who knows, could be true, except for the Knicks.

I suspect, understanding his fragile ego and profoundly damaged personality, not to mention the accelerating age and dementia, is leaving our hollow president emptier and more alone than ever on his 80th. He’s deeply disliked by more and more Americans, his health and mind are in decline, he faces the very real prospect of a historic mid-term defeat.

On the one hand it couldn’t be happening to a more deserving guy, yet we should acknowledge that he grows ever more dangerous as he declines.

The outrages will continue until they don’t.

This much is clear: Trump hates to be humiliated or defeated. His name coming down from the Kennedy Center surely wounded him. And that is a good reminder to all the law firms, universities, corporations and toady politicos who violated the basic tenets of decency and common sense by capitulating to Trump with money and praise, including vast amounts of self debasement. They didn’t have to do that. And making a stand really matters with this crowd.

Caligula is in the [White] house, but the crazy emperor is trapped in a big black box made of the tattered strands of his own personality. The finale, when it comes, will not be any better than the first acts.

But for a good parting thought let’s call on Churchill: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Finally.

Some links:

A look at American decline from the vantage point of a Ukrainian journalist.

In Ukraine, the war claims the lives of soldiers every day. Resources are scarce, the economy has been shattered, and yet even the poor contribute what they can to support fellow citizens, often through small but meaningful donations. Those experiences make it even more unsettling to observe how in the US, democracy is being eroded and dismantled, sometimes without an effective fight. And how a prosperous society, facing no comparable threat, can hesitate to redistribute resources that are readily available.

Worth your time.

A fine piece on the friendship and rivalry between founders John Adams and Thomas Jefferson by historian Marianne Holdzkom:

When Adams and Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, their lives took on new meaning. In eulogizing them, House member Daniel Webster told the American public: “They are no more. They are dead. But how little is there of the great and good which can die! To their country they yet live, and live forever.”

Now, 200 years later, Americans still look to these Founding Fathers for inspiration. However, what Adams and Jefferson demonstrated is not unity. Instead, they exemplify the capacity for people to disagree and yet work for a common cause.

Thanks. Keep in touch.

Leave a comment

Bear with me as I ruminate on the end of CBS News as we once knew it and what American journalism tells us about American democracy.

I go way back with CBS.

My first real broadcasting job was at a CBS radio affiliate and I remember the (rookie) challenges of properly timing the lead into the hourly news cast. Too quick and you created dead air. Too slow and you clipped the “stinger” at the head of the news cast. 1

Walter Cronkite was, and remains, a broadcast news legend and a personal hero.

Dan Rather made an appearance at my college while I was engaged in getting a degree in broadcast journalism. I recall that he was asked - this was about 1973 - if there was really a “liberal bias” in journalism?

Rather’s answer has stuck with me all this years. He said, I’m paraphrasing, “every beginning reporter spends time covering the police station on Saturday night, and you see and experience all kinds of human and societal problems - drugs, alcohol, child abuse, domestic violence and more. Given that front row seat on how our society doesn’t work for many people it’s not all that surprising that many reporters lean liberal, and think there must be a better way.”

I’ve always considered journalistic “objectivity” a myth. No one is wired to be objective. The goal is fairness and, yes, as Rather said, fairness with empathy and understanding.

Or as the great reporter Neil Sheehan once said, the objective is to get as close to the truth as one ever can.

What has been happening to CBS - and to way too many vastly important news organizations - is not about nostalgic longing for a Cronkite sign off or a Mike Wallace 60 Minutes interview. What is at stake is what happens in a democracy when the truth seekers and truth tellers are silenced or disappeared.

The meltdown at CBS under a regime that is determined to placate an authoritarian government in order to make a corporate deal is a tragedy for the talented people trampled in the stampede to make money, but it is also a tragedy because a free, vigorous, truth seeking press is absolutely essential to a functioning democracy. 2

Wires and lights in a box

The Ed Murrow quote at the top of this piece is from his famous speech to the Radio and Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) in 1958.

You really should read the whole thing.

Murrow candidly and brilliantly diagnosed what ailed broadcasting, both news and entertainment, in his long ago speech, and it is impossible to read it today without realizing how correctly he forecast the future:

One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news. Each of the three is a rather bizarre and, at times, demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles. The top management of the networks with a few notable exceptions, has been trained in advertising, research, sales or show business. But by the nature of the corporate structure, they also make the final and crucial decisions having to do with news and public affairs. Frequently they have neither the time nor the competence to do this. It is, after all, not easy for the same small group of men to decide whether to buy a new station for millions of dollars, build a new building, alter the rate card, buy a new Western, sell a soap opera, decide what defensive line to take in connection with the latest Congressional inquiry, how much money to spend on promoting a new program, what additions or deletions should be made in the existing covey or clutch of vice-presidents, and at the same time-- frequently on the long, same long day--to give mature, thoughtful consideration to the manifold problems that confront those who are charged with the responsibility for news and public affairs.

Murrow might have been describing David Ellison, the new owner of CBS, and the vastly inexperienced Bari Weiss who he put in charge of the news division.

More Murrow:

Sometimes there is a clash between the public interest and the corporate interest. A telephone call or a letter from a proper quarter in Washington is treated rather more seriously than a communication from an irate but not politically potent viewer. It is tempting enough to give away a little air time for frequently irresponsible and unwarranted utterances in an effort to temper the wind of political criticism. But this could well be the subject of a separate and even lengthier and drearier dissertation.

Share

Murrow could turn a phrase as when he bemoaned “five, six, or a dozen contraceptive layers of vice-presidents, public relations counsel and advertising agencies” who dominate the business of selling stuff over the air. Then he really turned it up.

Maybe he could see a Donald Trump in the nation’s future:

… this nation is now in competition with malignant forces of evil who are using every instrument at their command to empty the minds of their subjects and fill those minds with slogans, determination and faith in the future. If we go on as we are, we are protecting the mind of the American public from any real contact with the menacing world that squeezes in upon us. We are engaged in a great experiment to discover whether a free public opinion can devise and direct methods of managing the affairs of the nation. We may fail. But in terms of information, we are handicapping ourselves needlessly.

Murrow was pleading for television, and television news in particular, to be more that it had already become in the late 1950’s. He could envision enlightened corporate CEO’s investing in serious journalism that examined the nation’s many problems, and to those who claimed then - and now - that the great unwashed public wouldn’t watch or pay attention, Murrow said: What’s the alternative?

To those who say people wouldn't look; they wouldn't be interested; they're too complacent, indifferent and insulated, I can only reply: There is, in one reporter's opinion, considerable evidence against that contention. But even if they are right, what have they got to lose? Because if they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost.

This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and even it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it's nothing but wires and lights in a box.

More and more it is clear that we have the wires and lights in a box.

Assaults on journalists are assaults on truth

The strongest, most consistent pages in Donald Trump’s authoritarian playbook are his persistent lies about elections being stolen and his lie that journalists are dishonest. Those lies are the foundation on which Trumpism rests. (Well, of course, there is also Trump’s personal corruption, but as bad as that is it does not fundamentally threaten American democracy as the two big lies do.) 3

And what is happening at CBS is not happening in a vacuum. David Ellison wanted to buy CBS and Shari Redstone wanted to sell so the network in essence paid a bribe to Trump - a $16 million bribe - to grease the deal. The “settlement” was for a nonsense lawsuit “completely without merit” and, not by coincidence, it involved 60 Minutes.

Stephen Colbert called it “a big fat bribe.” CBS cancelled him.

Bari Weiss, never having worked in broadcast journalism, was hired, it’s now clear, to clean house at 60 Minutes in service to placating Trump.

And, of course, Trump essentially confirmed all this by attacking Scott Pelley, the 37-year veteran of CBS News, who was fired last week from his job at 60 Minutes along with the broadcast’s executive producer, two other correspondents and several others who have been with the storied program for years.

Trump called Pelley a member of the “stupid, crooked people that don’t care about your country.”

What a crock, but a necessary crock in the Trumpian strategy to delegitimize independent journalism.

As Pelley told Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times:

You become a journalist because you love the First Amendment. You become a journalist because you love the country. And while all the other descriptions that the president used about me might be applicable, not that one. [Tears up] There is no democracy without journalism. It can’t be done. That is why I am a journalist.

Pelley confirmed to Garcia-Navarro, as other fired CBS correspondents have, that Weiss tried to interfere with 60 Minutes reporting to soften or alter stories in ways favorable to the Trump regime.

“There was a thumb on the scale for the president’s version of events that I felt was a level of political influence that I had never seen in 37 years at CBS News,” Pelley told The Times.

None of them are perfect

Journalists are people with opinions, experiences, maybe some expertise, but few would claim to be above criticism or immune from error. Most of the journalists I’ve known, and there have been many, have the same motivation that Scott Pelley has.

They want to provide information to a distracted public, including information that is occasionally uncomfortable to otherwise very comfortable people. They make mistakes. They often stress the trivial or the unimportant. Some of them take themselves way too seriously. They also have kids and mortgages and except for a rare few pretty meager salaries.

Yet they are motivated to cover the school board and the state legislature and try to explain how things really work and why.

They also report on Watergate, the Moon landing, the excesses of the CIA, and the mistakes in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. They report on evil men like Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein. And they continue to expose Donald Trump’s corruption.

The best of them resist the kind of political pressure that a Bari Weiss has brought to CBS. The best of them try hard not to be Fox News. The best of them hope that if they are ever confronted with what the 60 Minutes staff has faced that they will behave like Pelley, reminding the rest of us what the craft of journalism is all about.

Our history will be what we make it

One final Ed Murrow passage:

Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or perhaps in color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live. I invite your attention to the television schedules of all networks between the hours of 8 and 11 p.m., Eastern Time. Here you will find only fleeting and spasmodic reference to the fact that this nation is in mortal danger. There are, it is true, occasional informative programs presented in that intellectual ghetto on Sunday afternoons. But during the daily peak viewing periods, television in the main insulates us from the realities of the world in which we live. If this state of affairs continues, we may alter an advertising slogan to read: LOOK NOW, AND PAY LATER.

I hope 60 Minutes survives in something like the form that has made it the most successful television news program in history. I doubt CBS News will survive what is happening to it, or that CBS writ large will ever completely recover from such avarice, corruption and incompetence.

Consider CBS a metaphor for the country.

The once “Tiffany Network” destroyed by greedy people for specious political reasons. And those indefensible actions encouraged and excused by a raging, aging demagogue who has the gall to label journalists crooked or lacking in patriotism.

Never has fearless, speak truth to power journalism been more important.

We should pause to honor the courage and decency of a Scott Pelley and his colleagues and embrace what they stand for, but then immediately recommit to rejecting the greedy, grubbing people who have forgotten, if ever they knew, what it is to act in the public interest rather than their own.

Leave a comment

It’s a metaphor for the current propaganda masters in charge of what was once the American government.

The Trump Administration is into erasure.

They have stripped the Justice Department website of information about the convicted insurrectionists who attacked the U.S. Capital on January 6, 2021. They are trying to make sure any record of this administration’s crimes and corruption doesn’t survive beyond January 2029. Grants to study history have been suspended. The East Wing is rubble with the explanation for why an absolute fable. The Fox News weekend host heading the U.S. military has essentially banned journalists from covering the Pentagon.

You may have wondered why there is so little first hand reporting on the American military “excursion” in the Persian Gulf. Unlike other American wars, say World War II, the Iraq War or Vietnam, when journalists were able to report from at, or near the frontlines, the Trump War is not be televised except when the propaganda masters make a grainy video available to Fox News or the president and his minions bloviate from the West Wing.

Trump’s wars will produce no Ernie Pyle or David Halberstam or Peter Arnett. There will be no independent reporting because authoritarian regimes don’t tolerate independence. The reportedly widespread damage to American military bases and equipment in the Middle East as a result of his undeclared war with Iran goes largely unreported because no American journalist is allowed to see what all Americans should see.

Except at the gas pump, or if you’re a farmer at the fertilizer supplier, the cost of the “excursion” is in no way documented. We have only the vaguest idea of what it is costing. A safe assumption is that it is costing several billion more than we’ve been told.

All this is just the way authoritarians like it.

But propaganda depends on more than just deleting someone from a photo or restricting access to information. To realize its full power the control of information requires a willful suspension of belief.

To believe propaganda in the midst of our current circumstances is to deny what can easily be seen with your own eyes. Just the way authoritarians like it.

And that brings me to the late senator from Texas, John Cornyn.

The predictable Texas massacre

Nearly everything important that can be said has been said about Cornyn’s miserable defeat in the Texas Republican primary this week, but I do want to underline - in the spirit of the title of this piece - how a decade (or more) of denial in the conservative movement found a four-term U.S. senator carry just two (2) of Texas’s 254 counties against an opponent credibly characterized as the most corrupt politican in the entire country. 1

Here’s the best thing I read about John Cornyn, from Texan Michael Wood:

I hope John Cornyn is remembered for what he is: an incompetent and cowardly senator who put himself before his country.

I texted a politico friend about Cornyn’s coming defeat, and the friend replied that, yes, Cornyn is a victim of the disease that has infected one of our country’s two major parties.

Victim? Oh no. John Cornyn is not and never was a victim. Actually, he has had more agency in our country’s existential fight against Trumpism than roughly 99.999% of Americans. In 2021 there were exactly 100 people who could have put this sad and sorry chapter of American history behind us for good, and in that moment John Cornyn hid behind Mitch McConnell’s skirt, who was himself hiding behind a completely contrived constitutional justification for letting Trump get away with an attempted coup—as if McConnell himself wasn’t the reason the Senate trial was delayed until after January 20.

Fifty-seven United States senators were able to do the right and obvious thing and voted to convict and bar that evil man from ever holding public office again, including seven Republican senators. John Cornyn, however, could not do what his oath of office required. I’m sure the senator was very lawyerly and eloquent in his explanation of why the man sitting in the seat of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln shouldn’t have been held responsible for the feces his mob spread all over the walls of our seat of government—but you know, and I know, and John Cornyn knows, that this little man didn’t want a primary challenge six freaking years later.

And yet again the world is shown the fruits of every Faustian bargain ever made: you sell your soul, and in the end you lose your soul without even getting the object of your desire.

Share

Denial is more than a river in Egypt

To do what John Cornyn did - ignore Donald Trump’s deceit, his vileness around January 6, recognize him as profoundly unfit for the office, and then pander for his endorsement six years later - requires a level of denial of reality (not to mention a character deficit wider than the Rio Grande) that most of us would reject from a friend or family member.

America’s conservative party has become the Party of Denial. Cornyn is just the latest to find that by even willingly denying reality you can end up embarrassed, disgraced, and soon well forgotten.

Cornyn’s party is in denial about Trump’s war of choice of Iran and how it has stunningly rewrote the geopolitical script in the Middle East and beyond. They keep repeating the fiction about the economy and inflation.

They ignore or deny virtually every one of Trump’s authoritarian moves from the silly and costly ones - a “ceremonial” arch, for example - to the profoundly damaging ones - gutting the USAID, a move that almost certainly has killed thousands in developing countries and worsened an Ebola outbreak. I could go on and on.

Nothing to see here is the motto

And, in fairness, it’s not just MAGA world or those, like John Cornyn, trying to out fox Mar a Lago Man who willingly play the denial card.

Former first lady Jill Biden said she was “frightened” by her husband Joe Biden’s 2024 debate performance and thought he was having a stroke.

“I was frightened, because I had never ever seen Joe like that before or since. Never,” Jill Biden told CBS News Sunday Morning’s Rita Braver in an interview airing Sunday on CBS.

“I don’t know what happened,” she said. “As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death.”

Please.

It took about a New York second for Jill Biden’s comment to end up on the ash heap of political history:

A former senior Biden campaign advisor told Politico that Jill Biden’s recent comments on her husband’s 2024 debate performance are “revisionist history.”

Said the person: “She and a handful of other close advisors around President Biden kept gaslighting us, telling those of us on the campaign we were the ones who were wrong, and that he just had a ‘bad night.’ I think she saw the reputational harm this caused her and is therefore taking a new position.”

The less-than-celebrated Democratic autopsy prepared following the 2024 election is largely more denial. Here’s some of what PBS said of the report:

The report is far from comprehensive, and it avoids some of the most critical factors in the 2024 race.

For example, it doesn’t address President Joe Biden’s decision to run for a second term at 81, despite widespread concerns about his age. Biden dropped out after a faltering debate performance, and Harris was quickly anointed to replace him at the top of the ticket.

The content of the autopsy was “incomplete” because some too smart by half folks had to excuse their own denial. Meanwhile the handling of the report by the national party amounts to political malpractice.

Let me try to get beyond the Democratic denial, and the reality involved in a basic question: why can’t the Biden’s, and the Clinton’s for that matter, just go away?

All denial aside, Democrats lost the White House in 2024 because:

• Many Democrats willingly suspended belief about Joe Biden’s advanced age and how has decline was playing with most Americans. (Republicans are embracing the same denial with 80-year old Donald Trump.)

• They ignored the southern border issues and inflation, handing those images to Trump to distort and amplify.

• When Biden, who said, we should remember, that he would only serve one term, finally withdrew after his awful debate performance, the party tried to rally behind Vice President Kamala Harris instead of finding some way to capture the nation’s attention with a real debate about who should lead the party.

• Harris, already saddled with Biden baggage, proved to be a minimally effective candidate who made numerous mistakes, including when asked if she would do anything different than Biden said, nope.

There is surely more to be said about the Democratic party denial, and like the conservative party, reality for Democrats begins with shedding denial of the reality looking you in the face.

Denial is not a political or any other kind of strategy. One can hope that through the murky haze of their own believing denial Democrats find their way out of the wilderness in November because Republicans aren’t going to even try.

Here’s Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic:

After losing in a blowout, Cornyn immediately pledged to support the ticket, including the opponent he had described as a fraud and a moral leper. Nobody expected anything else of him. The senator from Texas died, politically speaking, with his boots off.

Call me old fashioned, but I think the country - at least most of it - is tired of the unrelenting stream of bullshit from its president. People increasingly dismiss the Congress as a feckless institution populated by old men just waiting for their post-congressional lobby gig, while they trade stocks and avoid real issue. And the Supreme Court, oh, the Court, is viewed as an extension of the ruling party, not fair and impartial judges, but a political body dominated by a couple of angry old men hankering for a return to the 1930’s.

Khrushchev: a model?

Most Americans - particularly in the 21st Century - would not look to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Josef Stalin’s successor, for anything like inspiration, particularly when it comes rejecting denial and embracing reality.

But seventy years ago Khrushchev delivered a remarkable speech - four hours long - to his Communist Party comrades in Moscow. In that speech he denounced the brutal excesses of the Stalin Era and arguably changed history.

The speech was never to be published, but was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and reported by John Rettie in The Observer in 1956:

That was only three years after the death of Stalin, mourned by the great majority of Soviet citizens, who saw him as a divine father. So soon afterwards, here was their new leader telling them they had made a cataclysmic error: far from divine, Stalin was satanic. The leaders who inherited the party from the old dictator agreed that Khrushchev should make the speech only after months of furious argument - and subject to the compromise that it should never be published.

Its consequences, by no means fully foreseen by Khrushchev, shook the Soviet Union to the core, but even more so its communist allies, notably in central Europe. Forces were unleashed that eventually changed the course of history. But at the time, the impact on the delegates was more immediate. Soviet sources now say some were so convulsed as they listened that they suffered heart attacks; others committed suicide afterwards.

Such a reckoning will come to the United States.

The only questions are how long will it take and how much damage will be done as we wait? And how many heart attacks will there be?

Leave a comment

The paper is special in Idaho - and the country - for being fiercely independent and outspoken on its editorial positions, a not always comfortable position for a family-owned newspaper in a very conservative state.

I wrote the piece below for the Trib this week … thanks to those good folks and to all of you.

Let’s consider a hypothetical, a hypothetical that after this week may not be all that fanciful.

Let’s say it’s 2029.

Former Arizona Democratic Senator Mark Kelly, a decorated Navy veteran, has been elected president of the United States. In a close 2028 election Kelly defeated former Vice President JD Vance. Vance had the endorsement of Florida billionaire Donald J. Trump but was also weighed down by the former president’s political baggage, including ethical and policy failures for which he was never held accountable. Now Trump is relaxing at Mar a Lago, enjoying as much as a man in decline, out of shape and 83-years old can, the billions he made while president.

It was quite a run for the Orange Man.

Subscribe now

Now a Democratic president has inherited his piece of this new Trump Era reality. As Richard Nixon infamously said, after he’d been forced from office by the Watergate scandal – “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

It can be quite a run for the next guy.

Let’s imagine a Democrat - or anyone else - doing this

Mark Kelly, who had been investigated by Trump’s Pentagon for reminding active duty military personnel that they have a duty to reject an illegal order and then was investigated a second time for allegedly improperly discussing the shrinking U.S. weapons supplies during Trump’s long war with Iran, decides it’s time for payback.

If Trump can do it, Kelly thinks, anyone can do it.

As president, Kelly sues his own Department of Defense (DOD) for $10 billion in damages for impugning his reputation just as Trump once sued the IRS, an agency under his control.

In fact, Kelly, like Trump, is actually suing himself. He’s in total control of how his case and his claim will be disposed of. Maybe, like Trump, Kelly strikes a deal with himself that hands over $1.8 billion from DOD – your tax dollars – that in turn will be doled out, without transparency, to Kelly’s friends, political supporters, even family members who feel they were also damaged by the allegations against the new president.

Trump supporters are outraged by this corruption. How can Kelly get away with this they shout on Fox News? Why can’t Kelly be stopped? Maybe Congress should be a check on such vile corruption, but Democrats control the Congress so why bother?

The new standard has been established. Anything goes.

Share

End of hypothetical

If Donald Trump’s corrupt “settlement” with the IRS stands over the release of his tax returns the barn doors are blown off political corruption in America. Literally nothing will be off the table. Democracy becomes kleptocracy, “a government by those who seek chiefly status and personal gain at the expense of the governed.”

Welcome to the new American political reality.

I know, believe me I know, how the MAGA Republican base love their greedy kleptocrat. He could stand in the middle of 5^th Avenue in New York City and shoot someone, as he has said, and they’d stand by their man.

Their kleptocrat can trade millions in stock in companies he owns and then in turn promotes, he can accept lavish gifts from foreign governments in defiance of the Constitution, he can destroy the East Wing of the White House and then demand that congressional Republicans spend a billion dollars – your money – to create a fantasy ballroom, he can pardon insurrectionists, some who reoffend after their pardons, he can even loot the Treasury of $1.8 billion because you folks who love him apparently love him more than you love decency, common sense or not being corrupt.

“It is hard to imagine that any previous president would have thought he could engage in such an audacious act of self-dealing,” said the New York Times.

“Sue the government he runs, then settle the lawsuit with himself by barring the Internal Revenue Service from auditing his past returns. And as part of that deal, hand over $1.8 billion of taxpayer money to his allies.

“President Trump has used the federal government to advance his own personal interests and those of his family and allies more expansively and openly than any past occupant of the White House. Any review of history would suggest that it is not even close.”

Yup. But we love the guy, but will we love this blatant corruption when a Democrat is in charge?

Oh, and ask Sen. Risch, if you ever see him in Idaho, how he feels about the guy who rampaged through his Senate office on January 6 getting some of your $1.8 billion? Was that guy “targeted” by the federal government and improperly prosecuted? Maybe his payoff from the Trump slush fund will help keep him whole until his next act of political violence.

And if you ever see Sen. Mike Crapo, the chair of the Finance Committee, you might ask him, since he has oversight of the Treasury and the IRS and could stop this if he cared to, how he feels about embracing White House corruption on a scale that has vastly beyond anything in the country’s history.

It was once true in American politics that the coverup of a scandal or a crime turned out to be worse that the ethical of legal transgression of a president – think Warren Harding and Teapot Dome, Nixon and Watergate or Bill Clinton and that blue dress. But with the current occupant there isn’t a coverup. The crimes, the trashing of Constitutional prohibitions, the corruption and self-dealing is all out in the open.

You only miss what is going on by not caring, by looking away and by retreating into hackneyed partisanship.

Hackneyed partisanship looks like this: He’s our guy so it’s just fine if he loots the Treasury, engages in insider trading and, by the estimate of Forbes, enriches himself by a cool $1.4 billion just since he took office in 2025.

Tolerating this, allowing it to happen, not caring because you only root for your team and not for democracy will embed this corruption – this kleptocracy – deeply in the American system. The next guy will feel empowered to steal his share from you.

You might comfort yourself by thinking it won’t happen, that this is a one off just because we’re dealing with rapacious real estate developer who will eventually go away to count his loot.

You can say with some confidence that a man with Mark Kelly’s character would never pull this off.

But what about the next guy, or the next?

Leave a comment

His voyage from principle to pander means Cassidy, an incumbent senator and chairman of a major committee, ends up in third place in a primary, soon out of office and, one hopes, haunted for the rest of his days by abandonment of his Constitutional oath, his professional beliefs and what once passed for his character.

Cassidy is toast because the only thing that matters to the modern conservative movement are the whims, grievances and authoritarian aspirations of our American nightmare.

Cassidy is now a footnote to that nightmare and a pretty good example of how conservatism became Trumpism and why one suspects there is never any going back for the craven, character deficient elite class of Republicans.

Let’s briefly recount the arc of Cassidy’s career. He was once what passed for a “moderate” in the Republican Party, a semi-wonkish physician - a gastroenterologist - who rose to chair the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

Years ago Cassidy helped found a clinic that provided health care for uninsured patients. After hurricane Katrina he helped turn an abandoned KMart into an emergency medical center. Once a Democrat, Cassidy served in the state legislature, the U.S. House of Representatives and finally the Senate.

His great conservative transgression that turned Donald Trump into an enemy was Cassidy’s vote to impeach Trump after the January 6 insurrection, a vote that got Cassidy censured by the Louisiana Republican Party.

Then Cassidy, knowing he faced re-election this year, pivoted, or tried to, to regain the blessings of a Trump endorsement. Cassidy’s shameless vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary was surely, at least in Cassidy’s mind, the ticket to re-election. Instead it became the source of his debasement.

Cassidy was not a vaccine denier. Kennedy is. Kennedy had to get past Cassidy’s committee to win confirmation. Cassidy’s vote could have stopped the months of abject nonsense and lasting damage to American public health that Kennedy has caused.

A physician who believed in the vast utility of vaccines could have made a stand on principle and facts. Instead Cassidy put his re-election before the well being of his constituents and his country. It doesn’t get much more craven than that, but once again this is the story of the modern Republican Party that stands for nothing but a vehicle for Trump’s corruption, venality and self interest.

Long-time Louisiana political observer and historian Bob Mann wrote:

… Cassidy lacked the courage, the imagination, and the decency to put you and me ahead of his political ambition.

To quote James Carville in the New York Times earlier this week, “Bill Cassidy sold his soul to the Devil, and he didn’t get anything for it.”

Except that’s not entirely true.

What Cassidy received in return for his soul is eternal shame and a well-earned legacy of cravenness.

I hope Cassidy enjoys his earnings.

I hope he also feels the harsh judgment of history that will be reserved for a Trump critic turned shameless toady who sold out to the worst, most corrupt president in American history—and still lost.

Bill Cassidy could have written a different story for himself and his state, but he just didn’t have it in him.

It might have been different

Imagine an alternative world in which Bill Cassidy had stopped RFK, Jr. and, in turn, became a national spokesman for science and common sense in health policy. Cassidy might have spent the last year engaging in a campaign for hearts and heads of the vast majority of the American people who reject the sledgehammer Kennedy has taken to decades of scientific advancement.

Cassidy was, after all, the chair of the critical committee in the Senate. He had the history and credentials to be effective in the face of such stupidity.

Cassidy almost surely would have lost re-election in Louisiana. The Cult of Trump is very strong. But he could have left the Senate with his long reputation for seriousness more or less intact, and his role in politics might have been remembered as a profile in courage.

Yet in the the alternative, to appropriate the language of The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson Sorkin, Cassidy agreed to “subordinate himself to Trump.”

Meanwhile, the Cult of Trumpism rolls along with more and greater corruption every day, more trashing of everything from vaccine policy to the NATO alliance, more denial by congressional Republicans that this rot has no bottom.

Just today, as we momentarily remember another Republican senator who squandered his character for less than nothing, Donald Trump engineered a deal with himself to loot the federal treasury of nearly $2 billion of our dollars to create a slush fund to fluff his friends. It’s the kind of corruption that Vladimir Putin might blush at, but not the Republican Party.

I began this piece with a quote from the Corrupter-in-Chief, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

As usual, Trump was wrong. It’s all too real and it is happening, and guys like Bill Cassidy tolerated it, ignored it and ultimately tried to profit from it.

Cassidy got what all of them deserve.

Leave a comment

Instead of blatant pro-discrimination language conservative politicians needed to use code words to convey the message, or even better coded images that subtly but still unmistakably sent a racial message. 1

As the Mississippi Encyclopedia notes about one such memorable moment:

On 2 August 1980, with the presidential election heating up, [Ronald] Reagan arrived at the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, (Mississippoi) where thirty thousand cheering people greeted him. His speech for the most part offered standard campaign rhetoric, but he generated a national political firestorm when he announced, “I believe in states’ rights.” Though Reagan had spoken those words for decades and had in fact used them in Mississippi two years earlier, they resonated differently in Neshoba County, where civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman had been murdered during the Freedom Summer just sixteen years earlier. Since the Neshoba visit was the first campaign appearance after the Republican National Convention (though not the official launch of the campaign), the appearance at the fair continues to possess a contested place in Reagan historiography.

The dog whistles are coming from the White House and the Court

A lot of ink has been spilled around the question of whether the once-sainted Reagan was dog whistling to conservative white Southern voters who had voted in large numbers in 1976 for a fellow southerner, Georgian Jimmy Carter.

It’s easy to forget today that Carter won every state in the old Confederacy with the exception of Virginia in defeating Gerald Ford in 1976. That sentence is a measure of how much American politics has changed in the last 50 years.

There really is little doubt, I think, that Reagan was, rather deftly, playing the race card with his talk of “states’ rights.” The former California governor had opposed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and his political brain trust knew the newly christened Sunbelt represented his path to the White House.

As Rick Perlstein, the great historian of the evolution of the American conservative movement from Dwight Eisenhower to Reagan, has written about Reagan and his use of “states’ rights” at that Mississippi county fair in 1980:

These are the most reliable code words Southern demagogues could deploy to activate their audiences’ most feral rage against African American civil rights. Ronald Reagan, whose unshakable belief in his own purity of motivation was his defining trait, surely got to immediate work persuading himself that in uttering them, he was referring to all federal intrusion into local affairs, from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to the Department of Ed - the same thing he always excoriated.

Reagan’s most recent biographer, and in my opinion the best and most evenhanded of many who have written about him, is Max Boot. In his outstanding book - Reagan: His Life and Legend - Boot says:

… ever since Reagan’s first campaign in 1966, he had repeatedly used code words such as “jungle paths” and “welfare queens” while constantly denouncing civil rights legislation. In 1980, Reagan added loaded new terms to his lexicon - not only “states’ rights” but also “The War Between the States,” the preferred term for the Civil War among partisans of the Lost Cause, which he used in the South. He told a reporter in 1980 that the Voting Rights Act had been “humiliating to the South.”

I recount this history to make a point that is too often overlooked in contemporary political reporting, and particularly in the reporting of the mad rush now underway to reapportion state legislative and congressional districts in a half dozen southern states. This opportunity, presented to conservative state legislatures thanks to extraordinarily partisan decisions by an ultra-conservative Supreme Court, highlights that race politics, or perhaps more correctly resentment politics centered on race, has been at the heart of American conservatism for generations.

In this context it perhaps shouldn’t be a huge surprise that the John Roberts Supreme Court, the most conservative Court since the 1930’s, has destroyed the Voting Rights Act and effectively declared open season on “majority minority” districts across the South.

This Court is following through on a long-term project to demolish what Reagan’s rhetoric, or Barry Goldwater’s or George H.W. Bush’s never could - remove civil and voting rights as an effective tool to battle discrimination. 2

From Reagan to Trump

Ronald Reagan was considerably more measured in deploying the coded language of race than the current occupant of the White House, but the target for the rhetoric of each man has always been the same - white, mostly rural, disaffected Americans who never have, and perhaps never will, accept that the United States is a multi-racial democracy.

Donald Trump and much of the modern Republican Party has junked the “dog whistle” for much more direct and blatant language.

Trump has repeatedly referred to Black members of Congress, including House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, as “low IQ individuals,” he’s labeled African nations “shit hole countries” and regularly attacks a Black female ABC New White House correspondent.

“Such a stupid question that you asked,” [Trump] said, addressing Scott directly. “We’re fixing up the reflecting pond to the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, and you say, ‘Why are you fixing anything up?’ Because you can understand dirt, maybe better than I can, but I don’t allow it.”

“This is one of the worst reporters,” he added, turning to a group of construction workers who had accompanied him. “She’s with ABC fake news, and she’s a horror show … a question like that is a disgrace to our country.”

As far as I can tell no so called mainstream media organization has written about Trump’s attacks on journalist Rachel Scott, but in Trump World we kid ourselves if we believe for a second the president isn’t focused on Scott’s race.

In fact, the White House wanted the exchange detailed above to be widely seen, highlighting it in a social media post.

As thuggish and bigoted as Trump’s language about race has always been, it has not been remotely repugnant enough to disqualify him among his most ardent fans. It’s impossible not to conclude that what is in the man’s heart is also in theirs.

Share

John Roberts mission

Which makes the disastrous bigotry of the conservative Supreme Court helmed by John Roberts all the more harmful to American democracy. Donald Trump, much as he might have liked to, could not destroy the Voting Rights Act. His Supreme Court has.

Even before the final dagger in the heart of the law that sought to bring Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans and other minorities into the mainstream of American political life, Roberts had been on a decades-long crusade, whether he would ever admit it or not, to deny the essential truth of voting being at the very heart of a multi-racial America.

Here’s Pema Levy and Ari Berman earlier this year in Mother Jones:

Democracies are built on the right to vote and choose representatives. The United States finally recognized this right for all people with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But over the last five decades, Roberts has taken aim at the law, beginning as a young lawyer in President Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department fighting its reauthorization, when he claimed it would “lead to a quota system in all areas.” He lost that skirmish when Congress overwhelmingly voted to strengthen the VRA in 1982, but he won the larger battle decades later as chief justice, helping craft a string of rulings kneecapping the law, starting with his 2013 opinion in Shelby County v. Holder. The decision overruled Congress and freed states with histories of discrimination to change their voting rules, spurring the creation of 115 voter suppression laws in more than 30 states. Many were inspired by Trump’s election lies.

In 2019, Roberts toppled another pillar of democratic governance—if you don’t like a politician, you can vote them out—by writing in Rucho v. Common Cause that federal judges could not even review claims of partisan gerrymandering, deeming them “political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.” In the decision, Roberts pinkie-swore that courts could still block “racial discrimination in districting,” but now the Supreme Court is on the verge of making that nearly impossible. After October’s oral arguments in a Louisiana redistricting case, observers expect Roberts and the GOP justices to declare that districts drawn to preserve representation for voters of color are either unconstitutional or subject to insurmountable barriers. It’s a decision that would turn the 14th and 15th Amendments—passed under Reconstruction to give formerly enslaved people citizenship and equal rights—on their heads, and turbocharge Trump’s gerrymandering push. Such redrawn maps could shift up to 19 seats to the GOP in 2026 and “really runs the threat of just creating permanent GOP control of Congress,” Doerfler warns.

All that was predicted - dismantling Black represented districts and wholesale partisan gerrymandering - before the Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais.

Now it has finally come to pass.

Chief Justice Roberts has cultivated a much more sophisticated, scholarly approach to white supremacy than a Strom Thurmond, a George Wallace or a Jesse Helms ever did but Roberts has been vastly more successful that those white supremacists. That much of the press continues to portray Roberts as a conventional conservative, as he famously said “calling balls and strikes” on the Court is not only incorrect, but hideously so.

Ask yourself who beyond Roberts has exercised more effective power in the decades-long conservative mission to destroy equality for minority voters?

Put it bluntly: Under the pernicious guise of protecting democratic institutions and granting deference to state legislatures, Roberts - along with five other ultra-conservative justices - has used his version of the Constitution to weaken American democracy. His Court has become nothing less than a blatantly partisan extension of the American ultra-right political movement.

Roberts’ legacy will be as shameful as that of Chief Justice Roger Taney before the Civil War, and certainly just as damaging to the ultimate moral and Constitutional necessity of empowering minority citizens in a multi-racial democracy. 3

The dizzying speed with which this Supreme Court inspired trashing of minority rights it is playing out is simply stunning.

Tennessee

In Tennessee the Republican legislature’s super majority last week wildly gerrymandered the majority Black city of Memphis, demolishing the only congressional district in the state represented by a Democrat. And all of this is happening just three months before a primary election.

As the New York Times reported:

Democrats, noting that about two-thirds of Memphis voters are Black, said it was a blatant attack on hard-won gains for fair representation in a state shaped by slavery, segregation and the civil rights movement.

“Perhaps the legislature should explain why Memphis should continue to be part of the state of Tennessee,” said State Representative Antonio Parkinson, a Memphis Democrat. He suggested that the city should break away from the state.

“You’re constantly beating on us,” he said. “Allow us out.”

Louisiana

Much the same in Louisiana as my friend Bob Mann wrote on Substack:

So here we are again, watching another round of racial gerrymandering dressed up in the usual Louisiana political costume jewelry: “election integrity,” “traditional districts,” “communities of interest,” and whatever other phrases they workshop between campaign checks from petrochemical executives and private prison lobbyists.

The whole thing would almost be funny if it weren’t so grotesque.

Then, Republican state Sen. Jay Morris of West Monroe decided Louisiana politics needed a little extra seasoning from the Jim Crow pantry.

At a legislative hearing on redistricting, Morris turned toward the audience and snapped at the Black executive director of the Louisiana Democratic Party: “Shut up, boy.”

Boy.

Not “sir.” Not “please be quiet.” Not even the standard legislative “the gentleman is out of order.”

Just “boy.”

In Louisiana. At the state Capitol. To a Black man. In 2026.

Louisiana Republicans are, as Bob wrote, now the party of “shut up, boy.”

Alabama

And Brian Lyman wrote in The Alabama Reflector:

It’s spring in Alabama. But it’s winter for democracy.

And we are left facing some cold truths. We do not live under the clear dictates of the U.S. Constitution. The only laws are the vindictive whims of the U.S. Supreme Court.

We thought we were rebuilding, however haltingly and imperfectly, the multiracial regime lost after Reconstruction. But Alabama is still Alabama. And self-serving, self-justifying power is the state’s only civic virtue.

Reconstruction Ends Again

The First Reconstruction ended in 1877, when thanks to a corrupt bargain, national Republicans got the White House in exchange for withdrawing the last federal troops remaining in the South after the Civil War.

White Southerns, mostly Democrats after the Civil War, pledged to President Rutherford B. Hayes that they would respect Black voting and civil rights, but that didn’t happen.

As the Miller Center says:

… white southerners quickly turned their backs on their pledges, systematically disenfranchising black voters through poll taxes, literacy tests, and intimidation. Democrats in the South created a segregated society that used terror and violence to oppress African Americans.

The era of Jim Crow was ushered in and remained the mostly uncontested law of most of the land for nearly a century, flourishing alongside the Klan, segregation and rejection of a multi-racial America.

The Second Reconstruction came with the protests of the 1950’s and 1960’s that helped produce the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in 1964 and 1965.

People died fighting for the simple right to vote.

The foundation of that Second Reconstruction was shattered with the Roberts Court’s Shelby County decision in 2013, and the foundation gave away entirely with the Callais decision on April 29, 2026.

We should remember that the Supreme Court once unanimously ended racial segregation in public schools and the Justice Department once sent government officials to the South to register Black voters and often went to Court to defend the right to vote.

Today, dominated by ultra-conservatives determined to erase American history, the highest court in the land and the Justice Department - created by Republican Ulysses S. Grant in the midst of the First Reconstruction - have switched sides.

Truly “the only laws are the vindictive whims of the U.S. Supreme Court,” and what passes for fairness comes from a feckless Justice Department that takes its orders from a doddering bigot intent on retribution against his “enemies.”

Defending a multi-racial democracy

We are very much back to a pre-civil rights moment, with White southerners disenfranchising Black voters primarily, despite what they say, because they crave political power more than they value a representative, multi-racial democracy.

We come full circle.

Those white legislators in Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama and elsewhere profess lofty motives in defense of their privileged majority. They would (almost) never betray, publicly at least, the old racial stereotypes like calling a Black adult male a “boy.” They might mumble “states’ rights” to a partisan crowd, but would take great exception to being called a bigot or a racist, even as they warmly embrace the most openly racist president since Woodrow Wilson. 4

This is a long, long story, and we are living in the most recent chapter.

In many ways race and politics and resistance is the essential story of the United States.

I’ll leave you with this.

“Race played a role in every election,” Stu Stevens, one of Ronald Reagan’s most insightful and acerbic aides once said. When Reagan said, “states’ rights” that told the guy in Mississippi or Alabama that we can take care of the n_____.”

As Max Boot writes in his Reagan biography, Reagan, the candidate, had been warned, by among others, his pollster that using the coded language of “states’ rights” would be problematic, especially in a state still raw from civil rights protests and murders.

The language might not register well with suburban white voters, Reagan was told, “but Reagan did not care. This was the dark side of his pragmatism: He was willing to tap into dangerous and disreputable prejudices to win the presidency while insisting to everyone, even himself, that his intentions were pure.”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

As a country, directed from the marble halls of the Supreme Court and shaped by generations of conservative political actors tapping into dangerous and disreputable prejudices, we have taken another profoundly backward step.

Now we will see wholesale partisan and racial gerrymandering, denial of minority representation, and at every level of our politics the hate filled language of bigotry and resentment.

Some will argue “this is not who we are,” but it is what we have allowed to happen.

Reconstruction has ended again. What kind of country comes next?

Leave a comment

Six hundred peaceful marchers, most of them Black Americans, were marching that Sunday from Selma to Montgomery demanding voting rights. As the marchers began to cross the Edmund Pettis Bridge spanning the Alabama River on the outskirts of Selma they were attacked by 160 Alabama state troopers and sheriff’s deputies, some on horseback others wielding night sticks or whips while wearing gas masks.

Many of the marchers were knocked to the ground or forced to sprint away or face real harm. Some, like young John Lewis, then the chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and later a congressman from Georgia, were not able to get away and were savagely beaten. His injuries required Lewis to be hospitalized.

Subscribe now

Bloody Sunday and Congressional action

As I wrote in my study of Senate leadership in the 1960’s:

“Nothing, not the March on Washington in the summer of 1963, not the ambush murder of Medgar Evers, not the Birmingham police commissioner turning fire hoses on protesters, not even a church bombing that killed four young African American girls galvanized the country like ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Selma.”

Millions of American saw the shocking images from Selma on television in their living rooms and that brought alive the human stakes – and risks – in the struggle for voting rights.

Bloody Sunday in Selma was front page news almost everywhere. The Billings Gazette played the story on page one, below the fold, and with a stark headline: “Clubs, Whips, Gas Rout ‘March for Freedom.’”

The Montana Standard in Butte led with the story and spread a graphic photo on its page one, a picture of a helmeted Alabama state trooper ordering “a prostrate woman to her feet” after troopers broke up the march. The photo caption noted that the woman appeared to be unconscious and was eventually carried away by two fellow marchers.

The news played a bit differently in the American south. The voting rights marchers in Selma were a “problem” made worse by “outside agitators.”

Alabama, it was said, could handle it’s own problems.

It’s doubtful Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, a Montana Democrat, saw that ABC News report from Selma.

Mansfield’s idea of a pleasant Sunday night was to enjoy a quiet dinner with his wife, Maureen, and read a book. His tastes ran to murder mysteries and historical fiction. But the violent events in Selma outraged the former Butte copper miner and University of Montana professor.

By Wednesday, as Mansfield told reporters in Washington, D.C., three days after Bloody Sunday he was working on his own voting rights legislation, apparently in part because he was concerned that President Lyndon Johnson might not act quickly enough in the wake of the outrages in Selma, directed toward Americans simply demanding the right to vote.

Share

With Bloody Sunday in Selma as a powerful and disturbing catalyst, over the next several weeks Mansfield, as he had a year earlier, worked in total cooperation and with absolute candor with Senate Republican leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois, to pass the historic Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965. It wasn’t easy.

Southern segregationists and white supremacists in Mansfield’s own party vigorously opposed the legislation that would encourage voter registration and end literacy tests. Some Republicans argued that the legislation amounted to federal overreach and violated a state’s ability to manage its own elections. But those criticisms were the barely disguised desire of white southerners to continue historic “state’s rights” efforts to make minority voting difficult or even impossible. Additionally Mansfield and Dirksen, as they had with the Civil Rights Act in 1964, needed to overcome a 24 day Senate filibuster, and they did.

Years later Mansfield said he considered the Voting Rights Act the most significant legislation passed during his 24-year Senate career.

Section 2 of the Act prohibited discriminatory practices, including state level redistricting efforts that historically tended to dilute minority voting and deprived Black and Latino voters from electing Black and Latino candidates. Another section of the law instituted a “pre-clearance” test that allowed the Justice Department to evaluate changes in voting or registration practices in areas with a historic record of preventing or suppressing minority voting.

And then came the Roberts Court

Last week the six decade legacy of Mike Mansfield, Everett Dirksen, Lyndon Johnson, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis, the Freedom Riders and the many martyrs who fought and even died for voting rights was demolished by an ultra-conservative Supreme Court.

The Court, blinkered by a generation long disgust for federal legislation addressing the right to vote, has blithely forgotten the long, twilight struggle to bring American minority voters into the mainstream of American politics.

The conservative, Republican appointed majority on the court was careful, apparently for the sake of appearances, to not seem to directly overturn the Voting Rights Act, but there is little doubt that by continuing, over more than decade, a long series of decisions that have gutted the law, the nation’s politics has been radically altered.

The hugely partisan and historically ignorant decision last week was the latest and finally fatal blow that will almost certainly eliminate many Black majority districts and further stoke a hyper partisan death struggle over gerrymandering.

Some commentators have declared the Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais the worst high court decision since the Dred Scott ruling prior to the Civil War, and on par with the much lamented late 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision declaring that racial segregation – separate but equal – for Blacks and Whites in America was permissible. 1

“The VRA has not been dealt a ‘blow,’ wrote Atlantic editor Vann R. Newkirk II:

“the decision did not merely defang it. The law is dead, and no matter what happens in the coming elections, politics in America has been forever changed. For most of the nation’s history, the former Confederate states have worked hard to minimize the political influence of Black residents in particular. Now they have full cover to do so again.”

The ink was barely dry on the 6-3 decision before Republicans in Louisiana, Alabama and Tennessee signaled immediate efforts to redraw congressional boundaries, in most cases to eliminate “majority-minority” districts represented by Blacks.

In Mississippi conservatives are celebrating the decision as a way to redistrict the state’s only Black congressman, Bennie Thompson, out of the seat he has held for years. Thompson represents a district centered on the state capital, Jackson, that is predominately Black, but the state legislature can now freely dilute that minority strength. Mississippi’s Black population is 38% of the state – the largest percentage in the country – but the decision could well mean that minority voters in Mississippi will no longer be able to elect a Black candidate. 2

As the New York Times reported:

“Critics of the decision expect that any reconfiguration will not only endanger Black incumbents, some of whom have held office for decades, but also threaten a rising generation of Black Democrats in the South, who already have few avenues for ascending in politics.”

Some expect the Court’s effective nullification of the 1965 law will trickle down to local offices at the city, county and state legislative level, crimping off what has been a steadily expanding pipeline of minority political talent.

“This case has the potential to essentially stop Black political representation from advancing in the way that we know it,” Emmitt Y. Riley III, a political science professor at Sewanee, the University of the South, told the Times.

Law professor Joshua A. Douglas wrote in The Washington Monthly that the Court majority in the recent Louisiana case:

“pretends that race no longer matters in American politics and offers extreme deference to state legislatures, whom we should trust less, not more, to craft fair rules for all voters. The combination makes it virtually impossible for litigants to turn to the federal courts when states enact laws that exclude some people from the democratic process.”

Montana’s Mansfield, who did as much as anyone to bring about the Voting Rights Act, was never one to claim credit for the remarkable and often enduring legislation he helped pass. In fact, he often downplayed the impact of civil and voting rights legislation on his Montana constituents – the state’s Black citizens in the 1960’s were never more than 1% of the population – even as many Montanans wrote him making the same arguments against voting rights legislation as those made by southern segregationists.

But Mansfield believed unequivocally in equality, and he held two steadfast beliefs: faith in the Constitution, as well as the importance of the Senate under the Constitution in confronting the biggest issues facing the nation, and a conviction that the only sure way to bring about lasting positive change in American society was through the tireless work of bipartisan agreement that, while not always perfect, moved the nation steadily toward a more perfect Union.

For most of the 61 years since Mansfield helped engineer passage of the Voting Rights Act – the legislation passed the Senate 77-19 with a higher percentage of Republicans voting yes than Democrats – it was the fixed consensus of courts, politicians and most voters that the VRA was the single most important political step since the Civil War to ensure equality for all citizens in a multi-racial society.

The Supreme Court has now finished the destruction of that once settled reality.

As Lyndon Johnson, a Texan who began his political career as a segregationist and is remembered today as a great champion of civil and voting rights, said in signing the Voting Rights Act:

“It is difficult to fight for freedom. But I also know how difficult it can be to bend long years of habit and custom to grant it. There is no room for injustice anywhere in the American mansion. But there is always room for understanding toward those who see the old ways crumbling. And to them today I say simply this: It must come. It is right that it should come. And when it has, you will find that a burden has been lifted from your shoulders, too.”

Unfortunately, the Mansfield dream of equality and political opportunity for all Americans has now been erased from this good and quiet man’s enormous legacy as the longest serving majority leader in Senate history.

While it is dangerous to offer judgments about what historical figures would make of our contemporary world it can, I believe, safely be said that Mike Mansfield would be appalled that the United States Supreme Court has ignored both troubled history and a continuing political reality that has time and again diminished or even sought to erase the rights of minorities.

It will take a new birth of freedom and a new commitment to voting rights for all Americans to undo this historically noxious decision, and a new Mike Mansfield – should we be fortunate to have such a person – will have to lead the way – again.

Leave a comment

The Hungarian authoritarian, Viktor Orbán, got dumped by angry voters tired of his corruption and their country’s sputtering economy.

It has been and remains a mystery to me why any American political leader would embrace this guy. That many have is a testament to how far out in deep right field large portions of the modern Republican Party has gone.

Case in point.

Back when he was still a Fox News talking head, Tucker Carlson embraced Orbán, even producing a documentary about him 2021.

This was before Trump 2.0, of course, but here is what The Guardian wrote at the time:

Robert P Jones, founder and chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, said: “It’s right on brand in many ways for the kind of things that we saw in the Trump administration. This week Tucker Carlson explicitly referred to ‘the danger of Christian culture being blotted out’ both in Europe and the US.

“It is really is an ethnic religious nationalism that we’re seeing here. The enemies are people who have darker skin and are not Christian. You see a lot of anti-Islamic sentiment there and a lot of closing of borders. Tucker Carlson picked up talking points right out of the KKK [Ku Klux Klan] handbook talking about white replacement.”

Orbán’s style of leadership also echoes Trump’s “I alone can fix it” demagoguery. His government and its allies have taken control of roughly 90% of media outlets, he has undermined the independence of the judiciary and he is tightening his influence over the electoral system. Last month Hungary’s parliament passed a law banning gay people from featuring in school educational materials or TV shows for under-18s.

This is what American conservatism has become, or hopes to become.

Here’s Italian historian Steven Forti, a student of the strong men of the European far right, in an interview with Le Monde:

The main tenets of Orban's doctrine – rejection of immigration and minority rights, sovereignism – are well known and not particularly original in the history of the far right. What stands out more is Orban's practice of "mimicking democracy": formally respecting democracy and the rule of law (including the principle of elections, from which he has now emerged defeated), while simultaneously undermining institutions from within – undermining parliament, controlling the press, changing the constitution. After Vladimir Putin, Orban was the first leader within the European Union to break out of the classic dichotomy between democracy and authoritarianism.

Some break out. And so very familiar.

Now comes an out of touch, intellectually challenged congressional back bencher from Idaho who, despite the repudiation of Orbán at the polls, was praising him in the days after his recent defeat.

I mean, come on, when you’re in a hole …

Not the sharpest pencil in the box

On April 22, just ten days after Viktor Orbán, the corrupt, authoritarian leader of Hungary, was ushered out of office in a historic landslide – Orbán ruled the country for 16 years and systematically disbanded its democracy – Idaho’s First District Congressman Russ Fulcher said something that was truly vile and wildly, stunningly inaccurate.

While the entire sane world, and the vast majority of Hungarians, were celebrating Orbán’s smashing defeat at the polls, Fulcher was offering lavish praise.

The historian Anne Applebaum who has frequently written about Hungary and Orbán told National Public Radio that Orbán’s ouster was a product of a grassroots uprising against his corruption and his thuggish dismantling of a once thriving democracy.

“I think it was accumulated experience. I mean, look, this is a very corrupt system. The corruption was beginning to affect people’s lives - a deterioration of health care, of education, very high inflation. And I think that was coupled also with the revelations that happened at the end of the campaign, of Orbán talking to Vladimir Putin, of his foreign minister talking to the Russian foreign minister and appearing to collude with them against the European Union.

“You know, Hungarians still have a fresh memory of being occupied by the Soviet Union, and for a lot of people, even younger people, this was too much and people started chanting at his - both at Orbán’s rallies and at opposition rallies, Russians go home. And I think that was really the nail in the coffin.”

Kenneth Ross, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, wrote:

“One consequence of Orbán’s stifling of dissent was that he lived in a classic autocratic echo chamber. He heard what he allowed to be said. But leaders who trust their gut as a source of brilliance make big mistakes. Among Orbán’s was his corruption – the lavish estates of his family members while ordinary Hungarians scraped by, his use of government funds to pay off cronies rather than provide services that Hungarians need. Despite his promotion of family values, his associates pardoned the deputy director of a children’s home who had been convicted of covering up child sexual abuse. His close cooperation with the Russian government backfired.”

Share

Orban’s opponent, now the Hungarian prime minister, Péter Magyar, highlighted all these abuses and won a super majority in the parliament.

Yet, somewhere in the muddled, blinkered mind of the Idaho back bencher, Russ Fulcher, Hungary under Orbán was some kind of bulwark against, what, fair elections, free speech, anti-corruption?

“Hungary became the tip of the spear in the fight against globalism under Viktor Orbán, and an invaluable ally to the United States,” Fulcher wrote on his Facebook page.

A valuable ally? Orban personally blocked European Union support for Ukraine’s existential fight against Russian aggression and broadly alienated staunch American allies. If Orban were any friend of any American it would have been Putin’s pal Donald Trump.

But Fulcher had more to say:

“Recently, I had the honor to meet with Hungary’s leadership and discuss Orbán’s successful pillars of Peace, Sovereignty, Freedom, and Security. It’s my hope that their new leadership will see the value in maintaining these principles.”

Semi-loyal American politicos

In their book Tyranny of the Minority, political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt portray Viktor Orbán as the modern world’s most successful autocrat who used the trappings of constitutional government to undermine democracy.

Orbán, they write, changed how judges were appointed in Hungary in order to pack the judiciary with his supporters, effectively dismantling an independent judicial system. Under Orbán, Hungary’s public media was “restructured” to eliminate coverage of the ruling party’s opponents in favor of “nakedly partisan” disinformation. Thousands of journalists lost jobs, while private media outlets were harassed and fined. Institutions of higher education were punished for any program that failed to toe the party line and Orban used his power to pervert the electoral process, ensuring that his party would stay in office until Hungarian voters recently said they had enough.

Here’s Fulcher’s take on the near unanimous verdict of America’s allies that Hungary under Viktor Orbán was an illiberal, autocratic, near dictatorship:

“In Congress, I will continue to support a strong, enduring U.S.-Hungary relationship that perpetuates freedom of speech and sovereignty of nations. This partnership is more pertinent now than ever given unfolding events around the world and America’s relationship with its traditional allies.”

Well, Fulcher did get something right.

America’s traditional allies were appalled by Viktor Orbán and said so loudly and clearly. France, the UK, Germany, Canada and the sane western world rejoiced in his defeat. The United States under Donald Trump is the outlier.

Where did Fulcher, never having impressed his constituents or his colleagues with a grasp of much of anything beyond ultra rightwing talking points, get these insane ideas? Why would an American congressman behave so bizarrely, embracing, days after he was overwhelmingly ushered out by his own voters, a man widely reviled as a friend of Putin and an enemy of democracy?

Fulcher is clearly taking cues from the fringes of MAGA world (and Tucker Carlson) and the American vice president.

The White House patron saint of lost causes, JD Vance, flew to Hungary to campaign for Orbán even as many observers were predicting Orbán’s ouster. That act, in and of itself hugely inappropriate interference in another nation’s election, is evidence of how anti-democratic Fulcher and the movement he embraces have become.

In this context it must be remembered that Fulcher, displaying historic rejection of democracy’s fundamentals, refused to certify the 2020 election of Joe Biden, on the same day an armed mob attacked the U.S. Capital.

Levitsky and Ziblatt, among others, term such behavior as being “semi-loyal” to democracy. Fulcher and others in this clan claim to support democracy while “turning a blind eye to violence or antidemocratic extremism.”

“Indeed, throughout history, cooperation between authoritarians and seemingly respectable semi-loyal democrats has been a recipe for democratic breakdown.” And here we are.

Idaho’s First District has often been represented by ultra radical rightwing provocateurs. Helen Chenoweth, who served incoherently in the late 1990’s, was MAGA before it existed. While Bill Sali, who occupied the seat (for a single term from 2007 to 2009), was described by the late Idaho political scientist Jim Weatherby as an inept “right wing wacko.” Jim was being kind.

Fulcher’s in the same class, but arguably worse. At a time when American democracy is facing huge assault from authoritarian forces around the world, and from the White House, Idaho has sent a dangerous “semi-loyal” fraud in Congress.

Fulcher’s praise for Viktor Orbán should be his final straw.

If Facebook had existed in 1934 would these jokers have been posting praise of Benito Mussolini? Leave your answer in the comments.

Still at some point in the not too distant future you hope these authoritarian adjacent Republicans - the Mike Lee’s, the Russ Fulcher’s, the Tucker Carlson’s - finally get their comeuppance, just like Viktor Orbán got his.

The world will be better for it.

Leave a comment

Thanks for following. Share this if you are inclined. All the best.

Side note: I think the King did a fine job of speaking to the real stakes for freedom, free speech, fair elections, etc., that so many of our fellow countrymen (women) can’t or won’t confront, but I also think it would have been far better for His Majesty to call the whole thing off.

At this terribly fraught moment what a powerful antidote to Trumpish it would have been to see British prime minister Keir Starmer - he makes the call, after all - to just cancel the King’s visit.

The limpet that is the British PM might have cited a half dozen reasons for Andrew Mountbatten Windsor’s brother to stay away: the safety of the British monarch in gun happy America, the senseless war against Iran, the threat presented by the United States to NATO, the wholesale abandonment of Ukraine, and not wanting to have dinner with a convicted felon.

You get the drift.

Starmer doesn’t know, as many politicians, business leaders, and journalists on this side of the Atlantic also don’t know that confronting Trump’s dictatorial ways is always the best course.

You can’t placate him. You can’t make a deal with him because he’s a lying con man. You cave to him and you get what you deserve. Just ask those big law firms that paid Trump tribute or the media companies that caved to his demands.

What did they get? Not an invite to the State Dinner; only diminishment and embarrassment.

Still, the King came and wowed the Congress which will by now have forgotten all the good things he said. Then Charles made off to the White House to offer jokes about a Trump demolished East Wing of the White House, a level of destruction even the British Army didn’t accomplish in 1814.

We live in such a crazy, uncomprehending world that it can be difficult to fully grasp the perversity of how far a once strong American democracy has fallen.

Which takes me back to that dinner list.

Oligarchs have dinner with kings

There were, of course, billionaire “friends” of Trump a plenty, as Forbes noted:

Marc Andreessen: Trump donor and Silicon Valley venture capitalist, worth an estimated $1.9 billion.

Jeff Bezos: Trump critic-turned-friend and Amazon founder, worth an estimated $268.4 billion.

Tim Cook: Another former Trump foe who has developed a relationship with the president during his second term, the Apple CEO, who recently announced he will step down in September, is worth an estimated $2.8 billion.

Pepe Fanjul: Longtime Trump friend and key donor, the Palm Beach sugar magnate and his family control a real estate and sugar empire we estimate to be worth more than $4 billion.

Jensen Huang: The Nvidia CEO, a key influencer of White House artificial intelligence policy, is worth an estimated $181.9 billion.

Robert Kraft: New England Patriots owner and longtime Trump friend, worth an estimated $13.8 billion.

Howard Lutnick: Commerce Secretary and former Cantor Fitzgerald CEO, worth an estimated $7.4 billion.

John Paulson: Trump megadonor and hedge fund manager, worth an estimated $4 billion.

Isaac Perlmuttter: Longtime Trump friend and major donor, the former Marvel head is worth an estimated $5.2 billion.

Steve Schwarzman: Blackstone CEO and Trump donor, worth an estimated $39.9 billion.

In Russia you might call this gang of rich white guys oligarchs - extraordinarily, eye watering rich guys who have pledged personal fealty to the corrupt ruling power in order to maintain their money and privilege. These guys happily sell out friends and country because their money and influence rests not on any real principal or belief.

It’s all about the money and apparently the proximity to power, even if it is personally corrupting to be close to such blatant corruption.

As the writer Michael Tomasky - he’s the editor of The New Republic - says “oligarchy does have an economic element to it; in fact, it is explicitly economic. Oligarchy is the rule of the few, and these few have been understood since Aristotle's time to be men of wealth, property, nobility, what have you.”

So, of course, these billionaires, each having made an economic pact with Trump, were at dinner with a king, well, one king and one who would be a king.

Share

Congressional toadies

The usual suspects from Congress were in attendance: Speaker Mike Johnson, who usually feigns ignorance about any Trump insult, death threat or undeclared war, but in this case apparently read his invite and showed up. As did Senate majority leader John Thune and his second in command John Barrasso.

Idaho’s James Risch, not exactly in oligarch territory but still among the richest men in the Senate, attended. Risch chairs the Foreign Relations Committee but you would hardly know it since he’s refused to use that platform to explore why and to what end the country is at war with Iran. As Risch, who served a short stint as a governor before going to the Senate, once infamously noted, being a governor is real work, while being in the Senate was essentially a piece of cake. He had his piece last Saturday night.

The real fake news

Donald Trump likes to talk about “the fake news,” so he had them out in force to check out the King and Queen. Fox News was very well represented with hosts Bret Baier, Maria Bartiromo, Ainsley Earhardt, Greg Gutfeld, Laura Ingraham and Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott all in attendance.

Trump’s favorite newspaper, the New York Post, was represented by editor-in-chief Keith Poole.

And Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy was there. The New York Times called Ruddy Trump’s most reliable supporter in the far right media ecosystem. “In this day and age, people want something that tends to affirm their views and opinions,” Ruddy said in 2020 and he broadcast lies about the 2020 election being stolen.

Then Times media writer Ben Smith said this of Ruddy:

Nobody I’ve ever covered treats an audience with the blithe disdain of Mr. Ruddy. He has them watching a great story — a thriller, a whodunit — about a stolen election. He thinks they’re stupid enough to fall for it, dumb enough to keep watching even after the fantasy inevitably dissolves, buying the supplements and the books and, crucially, tuning in to channel 1115 in large enough numbers that, eventually, the cable companies will pay him.

Ruddy was a perfect guest for that dinner last weekend. And, yes, millions of Americans have fallen for it and they keep falling.

The Republican Supreme Court goes to dinner

There were no Democrats at the dinner with King Charles, a fact that most accounts of the dinner gave little attention, but which as such things go was widely inappropriate and entirely without precedent.

No “main stream media” figures were invited. No figures from music or culture. Northern Ireland golfer Rory McElroy might have been the only person at this dinner most of us would have enjoyed talking with.

And the six GOP appointees to the Supreme Court were there, but not the three Democratic appointees.

In normal times, with a bipartisan guest list and with a celebration of U.S. - British friendship on the menu, having members of the Court in attendance would be totally normal. But this was not normal.

The American far right’s decades long strategy to create a partisan court has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams. Trump considers the six conservative judges as extension of his authoritarian takeover of American democracy.

Here’s Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck, a student of the Supreme Court:

“The problem here is the symbolism, that these six justices — and only these six — were there. It does nothing to disabuse the appearance that the court is playing partisan political favorites, an impression this court should be invested in avoiding.”

The Saturday dinner only confirmed what every reasonably informed, democracy loving American has long known. Creating partisan courts that provide near total immunity to a president or use a secret “shadow docket” to decide cases benefiting the administration without offering discussion or hearings is classic antidemocratic tactic.

Then on Monday the Supreme Court, right on cue, effectively killed the last important part of the Voting Rights Act virtually assuring a future dramatic decline in Americans of color serving in Congress.

The Court majority’s companion sanction of wholesale gerrymandering, particularly disenfranchising Black and Latino communities, is a truly egregious backsliding of voting rights.

But such a move has long been a fever dream of the antidemocratic American far right. Now, along with overturning Roe v. Wade, gutting many environmental protections and vastly expanding presidential power, that dream has come true.

Imagine being Chief Justice John Roberts or Samuel Alito, the author of Monday’s opinion, sitting in the gilded White House among the billionaires, the right wing media media hacks, and the Congressional bootlickers.

They must have felt as though they had finally arrived.

Leave a comment

If there is anything of value here please consider sharing this Substack with friends and even your Trump adoring brother-in-law. I’m a pessimist, but everyone deserves a second chance to regain something like sanity.

Cheers. Onward.

A very good day to remember the late Wisconsin governor and U.S. senator who was its inspiration.

Gaylord Nelson deserves being remembered for a host of reasons, but bringing environmental activism to “the mainstream of American life and politics,” as his biographer Bill Christofferson has written, is as a good a reason as any.

As the current president does everything possible to dismantle environmental protections, gutting the Forest Service, embracing the sell off of public lands, trashing green energy, installing industry shills at EPA and the Interior and Energy Departments and remains chronically ignorant of America’s conservation ethic, the man from Clear Lake, Wisconsin would likely be marching in the streets to oppose it all.

Saving the Earth - always an uphill fight

There may be some comfort - cold as it is - to remember, as my old boss Idaho governor and Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus liked to say, “not all the dinosaurs are in the tar pits.”

In other words, the charter members of the flat earth society, the climate deniers, the “rape, ruin and run” crowd have always been with us.

Those who believe the only good tree is one on the back of a logging truck or that no pristine mountain is worth more than an open pit mine have their place in our history, but so do those who stood up and said - STOP.

Gaylord Nelson was among the first modern American politicians - with apologies to Teddy Roosevelt - to effectively harness public interest and concern about the environment, and years before the first Earth Day he begin to push back against the mindless exploiters and the greedy despoilers.

Share

That one-time Oregon politician is long gone and long forgotten, but the sentiments he expressed are, sadly, still very much with us.

This makes Nelson’s legacy arguably more important on this Earth Day than on the first Earth Day in 1970. As Nelson once said:

Is there anything more vital in the long view of history than the proper protection and conservation of our fresh water lakes, rivers, and streams, our wilderness, the soils and the forests, the air we breathe, the bugs and birds and animals and the habitat in which they live? I think not.

Gaylord Nelson served in the Senate when that body was inhabited by serious people in both political parties. Nelson’s smarts, personal integrity, common sense and deep commitment to real American ideals made him widely respected across the political spectrum.

He opposed the Vietnam War before it was politically safe to do so, he championed protections for some of America’s greatest places - the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in Wisconsin, among others. He recognized the dangers of DDT and the necessity of consumer protection. He championed the Wilderness Act when it passed in 1964.

When, in 1999, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel asked a panel of historians to identify the most significant figures in Wisconsin during the 20th Century, Nelson ranked high behind only Fighting Bob La Follette, the conservationist Aldo Leopold and the iconic architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Nelson lost re-election in 1980, a victim of the Reagan landslide that year when a 38-year old hard right wing Republican lightweight, Robert Kasten, out campaigned him and won, in part, on the strength of Reagan’s long political coattails.

True to character Nelson used the lame duck session of Congress after his 1980 defeat to pass more conservation legislation for Wisconsin and the nation.

If you took a moment today to reflect on the wonders of nature, the value of clean air and water, the importance of preserving wild places, you were honoring the legacy of Gaylord Nelson.

The current crowd trying hard to undo such a legacy will not, I believe, succeed. They misjudge the American people.

Nelson’s kind of decency may have been momentarily eclipsed by the nastiness and bitterness of our politics, but we are remembering him today, and not those who opposed what he stood for.

Here’s to Gaylord Nelson: Champion of the environment, father of Earth Day, a great American.

Thanks for following along. If you find value in these essays please share with friends or anyone who might be interested. All the best.

Leave a comment

About me: I am a Nebraska native, grew up in South Dakota and migrated in Idaho after college to work in broadcast journalism. In 1986, I joined the “comeback” campaign of a legendary Idaho political figure – Cecil D. Andrus – who eventually served four terms as governor and four years as Secretary of the Interior, not bad for a Democrat in a very conservative state. I had a small role in helping Cece Andrus win his last two gubernatorial terms. I did communication and crisis consulting work, and since “retiring” to the beautiful north coast of Oregon have written three books on U.S. Senate history. I’m working on a new book on another legend – this one a legend in journalism.

You can find my books here:

I write this Substack to scratch my itch to connect history with current politics. I hope, in some small way, to contribute to understanding of this perilous moment for our democracy, for free speech and facts.

I mean we have the FBI director, the president’s son-in-law, Pete Kegseth, the big beautiful ballroom, dismissal of charges against the punks that actually had a plan to overturn the 2020 election, etc. etc.

As historian Garrett Graff wrote Monday:

Washington can only pay attention to a scandal or two at a time — add in a headline-grabbing crisis, whether it’s ICE’s invasion of Minneapolis, the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro, and now two months of war with Iran that have spiraled into the greatest energy disruption in history — and there are all sorts of should-be-big-deal scandals that don’t get the oxygen or sustained media focus that they should.

Times columnist Thomas Edsall says:

Everything happens in such a rapid and scattershot way with Trump that it is easy to forget what happened as recently as last year.

Or last week …

One of the scandals Garrett Graff mentioned as being difficult to keep track of suddenly - like BOOM - re-entered the public dialogue late yesterday.

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer was abruptly dumped.

We hardly knew her.

Chavez-DeRemer, among other things, apparently told her staff to make sure she always had the vino necessary to do her job.

Chavez-DeRemer was a remarkably insignificant and wildly incompetent selection to head the Labor Department in the first place, but the GOP Senate rubber stamped her nomination because, well, Donald Trump thought she was up to the job, and the Republican Senate has disappeared into little more than a performative platform where angry old white guys go to get on cable TV.

But, truly - isn’t Trump good at this personnel stuff?

This is his third Cabinet member to go in a little over a month. There will be more. The betting markets have several favorites with Pete Hegseth and Howard Lutnick currently neck and neck.

Well, at least the former Secretary of Labor now has more time to spend with her wine refrigerator, if not her husband.

Here’s CNN on the Labor Department “resignation”:

For months, the Labor Department’s Inspector General’s Office has been investigating a complaint that Chavez-DeRemer was having a sexual relationship with a member of her security team, as well as other allegations of inappropriate behavior, such as sending staff to pick up liquor and attempting to use business trips as excuses for personal travel, according to a Department of Labor source with knowledge of the situation.

For example, Chavez-DeRemer had expressed a desire to go to events such as a UFC fight in Chicago, a Morgan Wallen concert and to see friends and family in various states, and asked staff to design work trips that would provide her openings to attend those events, the source said.

Let’s just say Chavez-DeRemer was not exactly Frances Perkins. You can Google that, and doing so may make you think that at once upon time in the distant past Cabinet secretaries were, well, serious, competent people who actually deal with real things.

But I digress. There are other scandals out there, my friends.

Case in point.

Enforcement of antitrust laws may cause your eyes to glaze over, but it is kind of a big deal in the big picture of how big and ever bigger businesses operate in our late stage capitalist world.

Trump recently fired the woman - it’s always a woman - who actually knows something about antitrust law. You might have missed it.

We should pay attention.

Share

Anatomy of a nomination

On February 12, 2025, Idaho Republican Congressman Mike Simpson entered, what for a House member is, often unfriendly territory. Simpson visited the Senate that day on a mission that he clearly enjoyed.

“It was a true honor to introduce my friend Gail Slater before the Senate Judiciary Committee today for her confirmation as Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust,” Simpson wrote later in social media. “President Trump made a very smart choice — the right choice, in nominating Gail for this position.”

The congressman lavished praise on the president’s nominee underscoring that he had known Gail Slater for years, they had eaten at each other’s table and that she was an immensely qualified professional.

Slater is the wife of Simpson’s former longtime chief of staff, Lindsay Slater, the staffer widely credited for Simpson’s most important legislative success in 2015, wilderness designations in central Idaho, including the Cecil D. Andrus Boulder-White Clouds Wilderness.

Gail Slater, before entering Trump’s orbit, was a policy adviser to then-Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, and before that had a top policy position with Fox Corporation, the parent company of Fox News, and before that, worked at the Federal Trade Commission.

“In these roles, she learned the nuts and bolts of antitrust enforcement,” Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said during Senate consideration of Slater’s nomination. Grassley stressed the bipartisan support the appointment engendered, including a letter from former antitrust division chiefs under Republican and Democratic presidents.

“The antitrust division will flourish under Ms. Slater’s strong leadership, and I’m proud to support her,” Grassley said before the Senate voted 78-19 to confirm the nominee with family ties to Idaho. That’s as close to a bipartisan endorsement as is possible in today’s starkly divided Senate. Every Republican including Idaho’s two senators, Jim Risch and Mike Crapo, voted for Slater.

Then the reality of Trumpworld descended.

Almost exactly a year to the day after Simpson’s introduction of Gail Slater, she was gone, fired by Attorney General Pam Bondi, two months before she would be fired herself.

The firing, like most things in the Trump administration, was abrupt and without explanation. Slater said only she was leaving with “great sadness and abiding hope ... It was indeed the honor of a lifetime to serve in this role.”

News organizations were left to speculate why the eminently qualified Slater had been canned.

The Guardian, citing unnamed sources, said Slater lost support from her former boss, now Vice President JD Vance, while Fox News said Trump wanted Slater gone because she hadn’t been aggressive enough advancing affordability efforts. This is the same Trump, of course, who has spiked world oil and American gasoline, fertilizer and natural gas prices with a war against Iran that he can’t explain and struggles to end.

The more likely explanation for turnover in the Antitrust Division — Slater is only one of several senior Justice Department officials to depart — is that the Trump administration really doesn’t care about enforcing anti-trust laws. Trump personally picks the corporate winners he wants to win, as he did by publicly putting his tiny thumb on the scale in favor of Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. 1

News last week that United Airlines was exploring a merger with American Airlines contained another important clue of just how unserious the administration is about protecting the public interest versus the corporate and pro-Trump interest.

As Reuter’s reported last week:

“United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby pitched a potential merger of the two carriers to U.S. President Donald Trump in late February, according to two sources familiar with the matter, but industry officials were quick to highlight the formidable antitrust obstacles such a deal would face.”

For whatever reason American Airlines soon put the kibosh on any merger, but the fact that United’s CEO floated the idea with the president is a big tell.

If Trump wants a deal to happen, his Justice Department, sans an antitrust chief actually committed to enforcing the law, would greenlight any merger, particularly if a company doing a deal hires the right lobbyist or makes a well-timed corporate donation to build a White House ballroom or a triumphal arch.

Two attorneys at the national law firm Snell and Wilmer wrote recently that Slater’s

“departure signals a new era of selective federal antitrust enforcement. As federal enforcement priorities shift, state attorneys general are stepping into the vacuum. For companies navigating antitrust risk, the enforcement landscape is fragmenting — and becoming far less predictable.”

The key words there are “selective federal antitrust enforcement,” or more precisely selective enforcement based on the president’s friends and enemies.

One of those friends is well-connected MAGA friendly lobbyist Mike Davis, who was hired by Hewlett-Packard to help ensure the that the Justice Department approved the company’s $14 billion deal in 2025 with Juniper Networks. DOJ’s antitrust division under Slater initially indicated its opposition to the deal and Davis, according to the Wall Street Journal, resorted to threats.

“If you don’t approve this settlement, I will destroy you. I will destroy your job at the DOJ,” Davis is reported to have told Slater, an account contained in a sworn statement from one of Slater’s top deputies, who has also been fired.

By the Journal’s account, Davis just went over Slater’s head for approval, while demanding repeatedly on his social media feeds that she should be fired.

Two months later, DOJ approved the HP deal, apparently after Slater was told she’d lose her job if she objected. She lost her job anyway, and we may never know the full story as to why. Shortly after Slater’s termination, the administration handed Live Nation, the ticket monopoly, a separate sweetheart deal. 2

Filling the swamp

This is the real “swamp” that Donald Trump promised to drain, a cozy world of billionaire CEOs, sleazy lobbyists and corrupt executive branch officials who are making a killing dismantling the law and regulations, many in place for decades, that attempt to balance a capitalist free market with the broad public interest that never benefits from excessive concentration of economic power.

At least Sen. Grassley had the guts to express some dismay at Gail Slater’s defenestration.

“Sorry to see her leave,” Grassley said, in praising her populist approach to protecting consumers.

By contrast, the silence of the lambs fell over the Idaho delegation, and particularly Congressman Simpson.

Simpson learned long ago that no one is safe in a political party where expertise and independent thought are never tolerated. Gail Slater learned that lesson the hard way.

Simpson’s great and talented friend was fired for trying to enforce the law.

Simpson said not a word.

Many of these “deals” are now in court in actions advanced by state attorneys generals. Congressional Democrats have tried to get information about the real decision making process at DOJ, without much success.

And the corruption continues unabated.

The Curse

I began this piece with a quote from the great Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis who long ago wrote a little book titled The Curse of Bigness.

Brandeis spent much of legal career before joining the Supreme Court as an opponent of monopoly, or as he simplified it - bigness.

Here’s Christopher Ketcham on the essence of the Brandeis view:

The threat that behemoths like Standard Oil posed to the republic, wrote Brandeis, was their concentration of economic power and decision making to the extent that they were effectively a state within the state, operating under their own laws. Many of the trusts were shattered, in a long struggle that Brandeis pioneered. It was his advocacy that helped push into effective action the antitrust mechanisms in government (the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, the Federal Trade Commission), which led to the breakup of Standard Oil and many of its sister monopolies by 1911. “American development can come on the lines on which we seek it, and the ideals which we have can be attained, only if side by side with political democracy comes industrial democracy,” Brandeis wrote. “It is the relatively small man who pre-eminently needs the aid and solicitous care of industry and government. We have, gentlemen, to bear all the time that democratic view in mind.”

Want to bet that Donald J. Trump has never heard of Mr. Justice Brandeis?

Epilogue

In a classic insider DC story at the time Gail Slater was appointed as assistant attorney general for antitrust, POLITICO suggested that her appointment was a test of how serious MAGA world was about antitrust enforcement, particularly against Big Tech companies.

Reading the story more than a year later takes you back to a fantasyland where Donald Trump was surely going to be a rational, policy oriented president.

How’s that working?

The most interesting quote in the POLITICO piece was this:

“I think a big challenge for Gail is, how impulsive will the president be?” says William Kovacic, a former chairman of the FTC, appointed by then-President George W. Bush and who says he’s heartened to have Slater — with whom he worked at the FTC more than a decade ago — in her new post. “You can’t say, ‘My god, shut up,’ because then you’re fired. So you cross your fingers and hope you’re not a target.”

At Slater’s Senate confirmation hearing she was asked by Illinois Democrat Richard Durbin:

… how she would respond if Trump asked her to bring an enforcement action against a firm out of retaliation, his political interests or personal grudge. “I do not expect that President Trump would make such a request,” Slater responded.

Leave a comment