Bumble Bee

 

Seen on Twitter

Saturday Break

 

RIP RBG

 

2020 just won't stop.

Joan Ruth Bader was the younger of the two children of Nathan Bader, a merchant, and Celia Bader. Her elder sister, Marilyn, died of meningitis at the age of six, when Joan was 14 months old. Outside her family, Ginsburg began to go by the name “Ruth” in kindergarten to help her teachers distinguish her from other students named Joan. The Baders were an observant Jewish family, and Ruth attended synagogue and participated in Jewish traditions as a child. She excelled in school, where she was heavily involved in student activities and earned excellent grades.

At about the time when Ruth started high school, Celia was diagnosed with cancer. She died of the disease four years later, just days before Ruth’s scheduled graduation ceremony, which Ruth could not attend.

Ruth entered Cornell University on a full scholarship. During her first semester, she met her future husband, Martin (“Marty”) Ginsburg, who was also a student at Cornell. Martin, who eventually became a nationally prominent tax attorney, exerted an important influence on Ruth through his strong and sustained interest in her intellectual pursuits. She was also influenced by two other people—both professors—whom she met at Cornell: the author Vladimir Nabokov, who shaped her thinking about writing, and the constitutional lawyer Robert Cushman, who inspired her to pursue a legal career. Martin and Ruth were married in June 1954, nine days after she graduated from Cornell.

After Martin was drafted into the U.S. Army, the Ginsburgs spent two years in Oklahoma, where he was stationed. Their daughter, Jane, their first child, was born during this time. The Ginsburgs then moved to Massachusetts, where Martin resumed—and Ruth began—studies at Harvard Law School. While Ruth completed her coursework and served on the editorial staff of the Harvard Law Review (she was the first woman to do so), she acted as caregiver not only to Jane but also to Martin, who had been diagnosed with testicular cancer. After his recovery, Martin graduated and accepted a job with a law firm in New York City. Ruth completed her legal education at Columbia Law School, serving on the law review and graduating in a tie for first place in her class in 1959.

Despite her excellent credentials, she struggled to find employment as a lawyer, because of her gender and the fact that she was a mother. At the time, only a very small percentage of lawyers in the United States were women, and only two women had ever served as federal judges. However, one of her Columbia law professors advocated on her behalf and helped to convince Judge Edmund Palmieri of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to offer Ginsburg a clerkship (1959–61). As associate director of the Columbia Law School’s Project on International Procedure (1962–63), she studied Swedish civil procedure; her research was eventually published in a book, Civil Procedure in Sweden (1965), cowritten with Anders Bruzelius.

Hired by the Rutgers School of Law as an assistant professor in 1963, she was asked by the dean of the school to accept a low salary because of her husband’s well-paying job. After she became pregnant with the couple’s second child—a son, James, born in 1965—Ginsburg wore oversized clothes for fear that her contract would not be renewed. She earned tenure at Rutgers in 1969.

In 1970 Ginsburg became professionally involved in the issue of gender equality when she was asked to introduce and moderate a law student panel discussion on the topic of “women’s liberation.” In 1971 she published two law review articles on the subject and taught a seminar on gender discrimination. As a part of the course, Ginsburg partnered with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to draft briefs in two federal cases. The first (originally brought to her attention by her husband) involved a provision of the federal tax code that denied single men a tax deduction for serving as caregivers to their families. The second involved an Idaho state law that expressly preferred men to women in determining who should administer the estates of people who die without a will (see intestate succession). The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the latter case, Reed v. Reed (1971), was the first in which a gender-based statute was struck down on the basis of the equal protection clause.

During the remainder of the 1970s, Ginsburg was a leading figure in gender-discrimination litigation. In 1972 she became founding counsel of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project and coauthored a law-school casebook on gender discrimination. In the same year, she became the first tenured female faculty member at Columbia Law School. She authored dozens of law review articles and drafted or contributed to many Supreme Court briefs on the issue of gender discrimination. During the decade, she argued before the Supreme Court six times, winning five cases.

In 1980 Democratic U.S. Pres. Jimmy Carter appointed Ginsburg to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in Washington, D.C. While serving as a judge on the D.C. Circuit, Ginsburg developed a reputation as a pragmatic liberal with a keen attention to detail. She enjoyed cordial professional relationships with two well-known conservative judges on the court, Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia, and often voted with them. In 1993 she delivered the Madison Lecture at New York University Law School, offering a critique of the reasoning—though not the ultimate holding—of Roe v. Wade (1973), the famous case in which the Supreme Court found a constitutional right of women to choose to have an abortion. Ginsburg argued that the Court should have issued a more limited decision, which would have left more room for state legislatures to address specific details. Such an approach, she claimed, “might have served to reduce rather than to fuel controversy.”

On June 14, 1993, Democratic U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton announced his nomination of Ginsburg to the Supreme Court to replace retiring Justice Byron White. Her confirmation hearings were quick and relatively uncontroversial. She was endorsed unanimously by the Senate Judiciary Committee and confirmed by the full Senate on August 3 by a vote of 96–3.

On the Court, Ginsburg became known for her active participation in oral arguments and her habit of wearing jabots, or collars, with her judicial robes, some of which expressed a symbolic meaning. She identified, for example, both a majority-opinion collar and a dissent collar. Early in her tenure on the Court, Ginsburg wrote the majority’s opinion in United States v. Virginia (1996), which held that the men-only admission policy of a state-run university, the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), violated the equal protection clause. Rejecting VMI’s contention that its program of military-focused education was unsuitable for women, Ginsburg noted that the program was in fact unsuitable for the vast majority of Virginia college students regardless of gender. “[G]eneralizations about ‘the way women are,’ estimates of what is appropriate for most women, no longer justify denying opportunity to women whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description,” she wrote.

Although Ginsburg tended to vote with other liberal justices on the Court, she got along well with most of the conservative justices who had been appointed before her. She enjoyed a special connection with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a moderate conservative and the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court, and she and conservative Justice Antonin Scalia famously bonded over their shared love of opera (indeed, the American composer-lyricist Derrick Wang wrote a successful comic opera, Scalia/Ginsburg, celebrating their relationship). She praised the work of the first chief justice with whom she served, William Rehnquist, another conservative. Ginsburg had less in common with most of the justices appointed by Republican U.S. Presidents George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump, however.

Ginsburg attracted attention for several strongly worded dissenting opinions and publicly read some of her dissents from the bench to emphasize the importance of the case. Two such decisions in 2007 concerned women’s rights. The first, Gonzales v. Carhart, upheld the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act on a 5–4 vote. Ginsburg decried the judgment as “alarming,” arguing that it “cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right [the right of women to choose to have an abortion] declared again and again by this Court.” Similarly, in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire, another 5–4 decision, Ginsburg criticized the majority’s holding that a woman could not bring a federal civil suit against her employer for having paid her less than it had paid men (the plaintiff did not become aware of her right to file suit until after the filing period had passed). Ginsburg argued that the majority’s reasoning was inconsistent with the will of the U.S. Congress—a view that was somewhat vindicated when Congress passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, the first bill that Democratic U.S. Pres. Barack Obama signed into law.

With the retirements of Justices David Souter in 2009 and John Paul Stevens in 2010, Ginsburg became the most senior justice within the liberal bloc. She wrote dissents articulating liberal perspectives in several more prominent and politically charged cases. Her partial dissent in the Affordable Care Act cases (2012), which posed a constitutional challenge to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (also known as “Obamacare”), criticized her five conservative colleagues for concluding—in her view contrary to decades of judicial precedent—that the commerce clause did not empower Congress to require most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a fine. In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Court’s conservative majority struck down as unconstitutional Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965, which had required certain states and local jurisdictions to obtain prior approval (“preclearance”) from the federal Justice Department of any proposed changes to voting laws or procedures. Ginsburg, in dissent, criticized the “hubris” of the majority’s “demolition of the VRA” and declared that “throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” Ginsburg was likewise highly critical of the majority’s opinion in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. (2014), a decision that recognized the right of for-profit corporations to refuse on religious grounds to comply with the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that employers pay for coverage of certain contraceptive drugs and devices in their employees’ health insurance plans. Ginsburg wrote that the majority opinion “falters at each step of its analysis” and expressed concern that the Court had “ventured into a minefield” by holding “that commercial enterprises…can opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs.” Throughout her career Ginsburg concluded her dissents with the phrase “I dissent,” rather than the conventional and more common “I respectfully dissent,” which she considered an unnecessary (and slightly disingenuous) nicety.

In part because of her increasing outspokenness, Ginsburg became, during the Obama administration (2009–17), a progressive and feminist folk hero. Inspired by some of her dissents, a second-year law student at New York University created a Tumblr blog entitled “Notorious R.B.G.”—a play on “Notorious B.I.G.,” the stage name of the American rapper Christopher Wallace—which became a popular nickname for Ginsburg among her admirers. Nevertheless, some liberals, citing Ginsburg’s advanced age and concerns about her health (she was twice a cancer survivor) and apparent frailty, argued that she should retire in order to allow Obama to nominate a liberal replacement. Others, however, pointed to her vigorous exercise routine and the fact that she had never missed an oral argument to urge that she should remain on the Court for as long as possible. For her own part, Ginsburg expressed her intention to continue for as long as she was able to perform her job “full steam.” On the day after Martin Ginsburg died in 2010, she went to work at the Court as usual because, she said, it was what he would have wanted.

In an interview in 2016 Ginsburg expressed dismay at the possibility that Republican candidate Donald Trump would be elected president—a statement that was widely criticized as not in keeping with the Court’s tradition of staying out of politics. (Ginsburg later said that she regretted the remark.) Trump’s electoral victory renewed criticism of Ginsburg for not having retired while Obama was president. She remained on the Court as its oldest justice, publicly mindful of John Paul Stevens’s service until the age of 90.

Aaron M. HouckBrian P. Smentkowski

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ruth-Bader-Ginsburg

The British Make Me Smile

 From: https://londondaily.com/british-writer-pens-the-best-description-of-trump-i-ve-read

British Writer Pens The Best Description Of Trump I’ve Read

Nate White

“Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?” Nate White, an articulate and witty writer from England wrote the following response:

A few things spring to mind. Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed. So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.

Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever. I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman. But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.

Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers. And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.

There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface. Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront. Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul. And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist. Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that. He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat. He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.

And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully. That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead. There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down.

So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think ‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:

• Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.

• You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.

This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss. After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum. God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid. He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart. In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump.

And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish: ‘My God… what… have… I… created?' If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set.

Monday Morning Smile

 

drumpf KNEW, so did Woodward

 Disgusted with drumpf, as usual. Here is the tape from Bob Woodward from March 2020.

Bob Woodward quoted Dr. Fauci as saying Donald Trump's "attention span is like a minus number."

DJT has NPD by Meidas Touch

 

Just Some Stuff Regarding drumpf and the Military

 Just in case you do not believe the truth of the Atlantic article.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/trump-americans-who-died-at-war-are-losers-and-suckers/615997/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_term=2020-09-03T21%3A32%3A43&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=edit-promo&fbclid=IwAR2pkAuXFTL5dSNoET8YaqmNjcNDNX-wVZ5HVXSRLrYhNHVhiuUb_sSN1VI

I have seen some people complain that the article in The Atlantic didn’t name their sources, so that made the piece “gossip”. So- here is a comprehensive list of verified facts that prove Trump’s disrespect for the military.

• ⁠In May 2020, the White House ended National Guard deployments one day before they could claim benefits.

• ⁠The Trump admin seized 5 million masks intended for VA hospitals. Kushner distributes these masks to private entities for a fee, who then sells the masks to the government.

• ⁠Trump fired the captain of the USS Theodore Roosevelt after he warned superiors that COVID19 was spreading among his crew. The virus subsequently spread amongst the crew.

• ⁠After Iran's retaliatory strike, 109 US troops suffered brain injuries. Trump dismissed these as "headaches."

• ⁠On July 20, 2017, in room 2E924 of the Pentagon, Trump told a room full of generals, "You’re a bunch of dopes and babies."

• ⁠Pardoned multiple war criminals, which stomped on long standing military values, discipline, and command. Trump has no military experience (May and November 2019).

• ⁠Trump mocked Lt. Col. Vindman for his rank and uniform. He threatened said Purple Heart officer, resulting in the Army providing him protection.

• ⁠Trump’s Chief of Staff worked—in secret—to deny comprehensive health coverage to Vietnam Vets who suffered from Agent Orange.

• ⁠There is a facility in Tijuana for US veterans that Trump deported. Wounded war vet, Sen Duckworth (D) marked Veterans Day 2019 by visiting this facility.

• ⁠Russia took control of the main U.S. military facility in Syria abandoned on Trump’s orders. Russia now owns the airstrip we built.

• ⁠On October 7, 2019, Trump abruptly withdrew support from America's allies in Syria after a phone call with Turkey's president (Erdogan). Turkey subsequently bombed US Special Forces.

• ⁠Trump sent thousands of American troops to defend the oil assets of the country that perpetrated 9/11.

• ⁠In September 2019, he made an Air Force cargo crew, flying from the U.S. to Kuwait stop in Scotland (where there's no U.S. base) to refuel at a commercial airport (where it costs more), so they could stay overnight at a Trump property (which isn't close to the airport). Trump’s golf courses are losing money, so he's forcing the military to pay for 5-star nights there.

• ⁠In September 2019, Pentagon pulled funds for military schools, military housing funds, and daycare to pay for Trump's border wall.

• ⁠In August 2019, emails revealed that three of Trump's Mar-a-Lago pals, who are now running Veterans Affairs, are rampant with meddling. "They had no experience in veterans affairs (none of them even served in the military) nor underwent any kind of approval process to serve as de facto managers. Yet, with Trump’s approval, they directed actions and criticized operations without any oversight. They wasted valuable staff time in hundreds of pages of communications and meetings, emails show. Emails reveal disdainful attitudes within the department to the trio’s meddling."

• ⁠Veterans graves will be "dug up" for the border wall, after Trump instructed aides to seize private property. Trump told officials he would pardon them if they break the law by illegally seizing property.

• ⁠Children of deployed US troops are no longer guaranteed citizenship. This includes US troops posted abroad for years at a time (August 28, 2019).

• ⁠On August 2, 2019, Trump requisitioned military retirement funds towards border wall.

• ⁠On July 31, 2019, Trump ordered the Navy rescind medals to prosecutors who prosecuted war criminals.

• ⁠Trump denied a US Marine of 6 years' service, entry into the United States for his citizenship interview. (Reported July 17, 2019.)

• ⁠Trump made the US Navy Blue Angels violate ethics rules by having them fly at his Fourth of Jul political campaign event (July 4, 2019).

• ⁠Trump demanded US military chiefs stand next to him at Fourth of July parade. (Reported July 2, 2019.)

• ⁠In June 2019, Trump sent troops to the border to paint the fence for a better "aesthetic appearance."

• ⁠Trump used his D-Day interview at a cemetery commemorating fallen US soldiers to attack a Vietnam veteran (June 6, 2019).

• ⁠Trump started his D-Day commemoration speech by attacking a private citizen (Bette Midler, of all people). (Reported June 4, 2019.)

• ⁠Trump made his second wife, Marla Maples, sign a prenup that would have cut off all child support if Tiffany joined the military. (Reported June 4, 2019.)

• ⁠On May 27, 2019, Trump turned away US military from his Memorial Day speech because they were from the destroyer USS John S. McCain.

• ⁠Trump ordered the USS John McCain out of sight during his visit to Japan (May 15, 2019). The ship's name was subsequently covered (May 27, 2019).

• ⁠Trump purged 200,000 vets' healthcare applications (due to known administrative errors within VA’s enrollment system. (Reported May 13, 2019.)

• ⁠Trump deported a spouse of fallen Army soldier killed in Afghanistan, leaving their daughter parentless (April 16, 2019).

• ⁠On March 20, 2019, Trump complained that a deceased war hero didn't thank him for his funeral.

• ⁠Between December 22, 2018, and January 25, 2019, Trump refused to sign his party's funding bill, which shut down the government, forcing the Coast Guard to go without pay, which made service members rely on food pantries. However, his appointees got a $10,000 pay raise.

• ⁠He banned service members from serving based on gender identity (January 22, 2019).

• ⁠He denied female troops access to birth control to limit sexual activity - an ongoing situation. (Published January 18, 2019.)

• ⁠He tried to deport a Marine vet who is a US-born citizen (January 16, 2019).

• ⁠When a man was caught swindling veterans pensions for high-interest “cash advances," Trump's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fined him one dollar (January 26, 2019).

• ⁠He called a retired general a "dog" with a "big, dumb mouth" (January 1, 2019).

• ⁠He increased privatization of the VA, leading to longer waits and higher taxpayer cost (2018).

• ⁠He finally visited troops 2 years after taking office, but only after 154 vacation days at his properties (December 26, 2018).

• ⁠He revealed a covert Seal Team 5 deployment, including names and faces, on Twitter during his visit to Iraq (December 26, 2018).

• ⁠Trump lied to deployed troops that he gave them a 10% raise (December 26, 2018). He tried giving the military a raise that was lower than the standard living adjustment. Congress told him that idea wasn't going to work. Then after giving them the raise that Congress made him, he lied about it pretending that it was larger than Obama's. It wasn't.

• ⁠He fired service members living with HIV just before the 2018 holidays.

• ⁠He tried to slash disability and unemployment benefits for Veterans to $0, and eliminate the unemployability extrascheduler rating (December 17, 2018).

• ⁠He called troops on Thanksgiving and told them he's most thankful for himself (Thanksgiving, 2018).

• ⁠He urged Florida to not count deployed military votes (November 12, 2018).

• ⁠He canceled an Arlington Cemetery visit on Veterans Day due to light rain (November 12, 2018).

• ⁠While in Europe commemorating the end of WWI, he didn't attend the ceremony at a US cemetery due to the rain - other world leaders went anyway (November 10, 2018).

• ⁠He used troops as a political prop by sending them on a phantom mission to the border and made them miss Thanksgiving with their families (October-December 2018).

• ⁠He stopped using troops as a political prop immediately after the election. However, the troops remained in muddy camps on the border (November 7, 2018).

• ⁠Trump changed the GI Bill through his Forever GI Act, causing the VA to miss veteran benefits, including housing allowances. This caused many vets to run out of food and rent. (Reported October 7, 2018.)

• ⁠Trump doubled the rejection rate for veterans requesting family deportation protections (July 5, 2018).

• ⁠Trump deported active-duty spouses. (11,800 military families faced this problem as of April 2018.)

• ⁠He forgot a fallen soldier's name during a call to his pregnant widow, then attacked her the next day (October 23-24, 2017).

• ⁠He sent commandos into an ambush due to a lack of intel, and sends contractors to pick them up, resulting in a commando being left behind, tortured, and executed. Trump approved the mission because Bannon told him Obama didn't have the guts to do it (October 4, 2017).

• ⁠He blocked a veteran group on Twitter (June 2017).

• ⁠He ordered the discharge of active-duty immigrant troops with good records (2017-present).

• ⁠He deported veterans (2017-present).

• ⁠He said he knows more about ISIS than American generals (October 2016).

• ⁠On October 3, 2016, Trump said vets get PTSD because they aren't strong. (Note: Yes, he said it's "because they aren't strong." He didn't say it's because they're weak. This distinction is important because of Snopes.)

• ⁠Trump accepted a Purple Heart from a fan at one of his rallies and said: “I always wanted to get the Purple Heart. This was much easier” (August 2, 2016).

• ⁠Trump attacks Gold Star families: Myeshia Johnson (Gold Star widow), Khan family (Gold Star parents) et alia (2016-present).

• ⁠Trump sent funds raised from a January 2016 veterans benefit to the Donald J. Trump Foundation instead of veterans charities; the foundation has since been ordered shut because of fraud (January 2016).

• ⁠Trump said he has "more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military" because he went to a military-style academy (2015 biography).

• ⁠Trump said he doesn't consider POWs heroes because they were caught. He said he prefers people who were not caught (July 18, 2015).

• ⁠Trump said having unprotected sex was his own personal Vietnam (1998).

• ⁠For a decade, Trump sought to kick veterans off Fifth Avenue because he found them unsightly nuisances outside of Trump Tower (1991).

• ⁠Trump dodged the draft five times by having a doctor diagnose him with bone spurs.

• ⁠No Trump in America has ever served in the military: This spans five generations, and every branch of the family tree. In fact, the reason his grandfather immigrated to America was "to avoid military service.”

Monday Morning Smile

 

The Fragility of Donald Trump's Hair - Lawrence O'Donnell

 

This is in response to this article, published in the Atlantic on September 3, 2020.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/trump-americans-who-died-at-war-are-losers-and-suckers/615997/

James Mattis on drumpf's "leadership"

 Published June 4, 2020

Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis issued an extraordinary criticism of President Trump's leadership in a statement published in The Atlantic on Thursday.

IN UNION THERE IS STRENGTH

I have watched this week's unfolding events, angry and appalled. The words "Equal Justice Under Law" are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court. This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand — one that all of us should be able to get behind. We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers. The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values — our values as people and our values as a nation.

When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens — much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.

We must reject any thinking of our cities as a "battlespace" that our uniformed military is called upon to "dominate." At home, we should use our military only when requested to do so, on very rare occasions, by state governors. Militarizing our response, as we witnessed in Washington, D.C., sets up a conflict — a false conflict — between the military and civilian society. It erodes the moral ground that ensures a trusted bond between men and women in uniform and the society they are sworn to protect, and of which they themselves are a part. Keeping public order rests with civilian state and local leaders who best understand their communities and are answerable to them.

James Madison wrote in Federalist 14 that "America united with a handful of troops, or without a single soldier, exhibits a more forbidding posture to foreign ambition than America disunited, with a hundred thousand veterans ready for combat." We do not need to militarize our response to protests. We need to unite around a common purpose. And it starts by guaranteeing that all of us are equal before the law.

Instructions given by the military departments to our troops before the Normandy invasion reminded soldiers that "The Nazi slogan for destroying us ... was 'Divide and Conquer.' Our American answer is 'In Union there is Strength.'" We must summon that unity to surmount this crisis — confident that we are better than our politics.

Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.

We can come through this trying time stronger, and with a renewed sense of purpose and respect for one another. The pandemic has shown us that it is not only our troops who are willing to offer the ultimate sacrifice for the safety of the community. Americans in hospitals, grocery stores, post offices, and elsewhere have put their lives on the line in order to serve their fellow citizens and their country. We know that we are better than the abuse of executive authority that we witnessed in Lafayette Square. We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution. At the same time, we must remember Lincoln's "better angels," and listen to them, as we work to unite.

Only by adopting a new path — which means, in truth, returning to the original path of our founding ideals — will we again be a country admired and respected at home and abroad.