Constitution 101: Judiciary is equal co-branch of government. Will somebody finally deliver that message to Donald Trump?

Two echo opinion letters published in the Los Angeles Times:

To the editor: The Trump administration’s argument against nationwide judicial injunctions with respect to the issue of birthright citizenship is, at best, tissue thin (“Justices skeptical of Trump plan to limit birthright citizenship but also injunctions that block it,” May 15).

The administration’s idea that all judicial push-back injunctions (yes, plural) to the Trumpian rewrite of birthright citizenship should be confined merely to the specific plaintiffs before the federal judges, the district of those federal judges or the particular state in which the judges preside is, by necessity, precluded by the wording of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That 14th Amendment language clearly confers not only a state citizenship upon the native-born, but also a federal U.S. citizenship. By that wording, any injunction issued preventing President Trump’s attempted rewriting of the 14th Amendment must necessarily carry country-wide scope.

This latest Trump appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court is nothing but an obvious unconstitutional dodge and betrayal of his oath of office to see to it that the laws are faithfully executed.

From David L. Clark, in Saticoy, California.

To the editor: Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison from Paris on March 15, 1789, when delegates at the Constitutional Convention debated inclusion of a bill of rights: 

“In the arguments in favor of a declaration of rights, you omit one which has great weight with me, the legal check which it puts into the hands of the judiciary.” The Supreme Court may hobble the judiciary as a coequal branch of government.

The judiciary has helped advance liberty when Congress refused. Lower courts advanced liberty in United States vs. Wong Kim Ark (1898) by upholding the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment. They ruled that passage of California Proposition 14 in 1964, which would’ve allowed landlords and property sellers to racially discriminate, violated the equal protection clause in the 14th Amendment. Lower courts started the liberation for interracial couples to live as husband and wife in Loving vs. Virginia (1967).

I hope future elections uphold the legal check of the judiciary against mob and monarchical rule as a threat to liberty.

From Glenn Shockley, Winnetka, Los Angeles, California

Evil white supremacy and the January 6th insurrection

Echo essay published in the History News Network and The Guardian, written by Carol Anderson.

American democracy’s most dangerous adversary is white supremacy. 

The January 6, 2021, horrific insurrectionist attack on American democracy should have resulted in a full-throttled response. But, once again, white supremacy is able to walk away virtually unscathed.’ Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Throughout American nation’s history, white supremacy has undermined, twisted and attacked the viability of the United States. What makes white supremacy so lethal, however, is not just its presence but also the refusal to hold its adherents fully accountable for the damage they have done and continue to do to the nation. 

The insurrection on 6th January and the weak response are only the latest example.

During the war for independence, after the British captured Savannah, the king’s forces set out to capture a wholly unprepared South Carolina. John Laurens, an aide-de-camp of George Washington, pleaded with the South Carolina government to arm the enslaved because the state didn’t have enough available white men to fight the 8,000-strong British force barreling toward Charleston. This was a crisis born of South Carolina’s decision to divert most of the state’s white men from the Continental Army to fight the Redcoats and, instead, enlist them in the militia to control the enslaved population, whom they defined as the primary threat.

The response to Laurens’ plan was, therefore, “horror” and “alarm”. Umbrage even. The state’s political leaders were so appalled that they questioned whether “this union was worth fighting for at all”. The United States of America was not nearly as important as maintaining slavery. They, therefore, toyed with the idea of surrendering to the British, making a separate peace. For that flat-out refusal to fight with every resource at its command, and clear willingness to sacrifice the United States simply to maintain slavery, South Carolina suffered no consequences. It wasn’t ostracized. It wasn’t penalized. Instead, the state’s leaders were fully embraced as Founding Fathers and welcomed into the new nation’s halls of power.

Several years later, at the 1787, constitutional convention, the south once again put white supremacy above the viability of the United States. In tough negotiations, South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia’s representatives were willing to hold the nation hostage and risk its destruction unless protection of slavery and the empowering of enslavers was embedded in the constitution. The negotiators acknowledged exactly what was going on and even, sometimes, how reprehensible it was. When, for example, the delegates bowed down to the south’s demands for 20 additional years of the Atlantic slave trade, James Madison admitted that without that concession, “the southern states would not have entered into the union of America”. And, therefore, as “great as the evil is” he added “the dismemberment of the Union would be worse”.

The same refrain played after the infamous three-fifths clause passed under the southern threat to walk away and, thus, scuttle the constitution and the United States. Massachusetts delegate Rufus King called the nefarious formula to determine representation in Congress one of the constitution’s “greatest blemishes” while lamenting that it “was a necessary sacrifice to the establishment of the Constitution”.

Holding those accountable who lied for The Former Guy on January 6, 2021. They are guilty for protecting the liar-in-chief.

The enslavers’ extortionist threats – white supremacy as the price for the nation to come into being – should have created a massive backlash. But it didn’t. There was no retribution, only compliance and acquiescence. The demonstrated lack of accountability for threatening the viability of the United States served only to embolden the slaveholders, who bullied, harangued and pummeled other congressional leaders, including the brutal 1856 beating of Senator Charles Sumner by southerner Preston Brooks on the Senate floor, to get their way.

When the bullying and beatings no longer worked, and the nation dared elect a president opposed to slavery spreading any further, the slaveholders launched a military attack against the United States. They wanted, according to Alexander H. Stephens, vice-president of the Confederate States of America, the “disintegration” of the Union. He said that the United States had to be destroyed because, unlike the US, the Confederacy’s “cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition”.

To wage its war for white supremacy, the Confederates killed and wounded more than 646,000 American soldiers. In addition to the loss of life, fending off the CSA’s devastating military assault cost the United States billions of dollars. The CSA also tried to badger and entice the British and French to ally with the Confederacy and attack the United States.

For doing so much to destroy this nation, after the Confederate's defeat, the consequences were disproportionately minimal. President Andrew Johnson granted many of the Confederacy’s leaders amnesty and allowed them to resume positions of power in the government. The entrée into American society for the traitors was also paved by the way the US supreme court dismantled many of the protections put in place by Congress for post-civil war Black citizenship – the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, as well as laws banning racial segregation and white domestic terrorism – and allowed the bureaucratic and lynching violence of Jim Crow to eviscerate the “self-evident” principles of equality. And to ensure that a narrative of white supremacy’s innocence permeated the nation’s textbooks, the Confederacy’s treachery became the “war of Northern aggression” and the south’s “Lost Cause” became nothing less than noble. The forgiveness tour continued as the states, not just in the south, allowed the erection of statues in the public square honoring those who committed treason.

The 6th January invasion of the US Capitol, provoked by the lie that cities with sizable minority populations, such as Atlanta, Milwaukee and Philadelphia, “stole” the 2020, election is, at its core, white supremacists’ anger that African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans and Native Americans not only voted but did so decisively against Donald Trump. The invaders constructed gallows, stormed the US Capitol, wanted to hang Vice-President Mike Pence, who would not hand the election to Trump, and hunted for the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. They beat police officers, yelled “nigger” at others, carried the Confederate flag through the halls of the building and decided that those defending the Capitol were the actual “traitors” who needed to be killed.

This horrific attack on American democracy should have resulted in a full-throttled response. But, once again, white supremacy is able to walk away virtually unscathed. US senators and representatives who were at the rally inciting the invaders were not expelled from Congress. Similarly, in shades of the post- civil war Confederacy, several politicians who attended the incendiary event at the Ellipse were recently re-elected to office. And those who stormed the Capitol are getting charged with misdemeanors, being allowed to go on vacations out of the country, and, despite the attempt to stage a coup and overturn the results of a presidential election, getting feather-light sentences.

It also took months to establish a congressional committee to investigate 6th January, but it’s already clear that its subpoenas, as Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Clark so brazenly demonstrated, can be violated and mocked at will with no consequences. And, like the Lost Cause, its adherents have tried to rewrite this assault on America as “a normal tourist visit” or simply “law-abiding, patriotic, mom and pop, young adults pushing baby carriages”.

In other words, America has a really bad habit of letting white supremacy get away with repeated attempts to murder American democracy. It’s time to break that habit. If we don’t, they just might succeed next time.

Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler professor of African American studies at Emory University and the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide and One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy. 

Trumpzi Republicans are acting like a Vichy cult but a few are speaking out: Where is Senator Susan Collins?

Military echos of opposition to Donald Trump’s wrongful take over of the White House 

Published in The Atlantic by Jeffrey Goldberg

Vichy Regime - 75th anniversary of les rafles: the round-ups in Paris and other cities across the country of tens of thousands of foreign and French Jews. Though France was under German occupation, French officials alone carried out the rafles. French police, knocking at doors and stopping people in the streets, bundled away those guilty of being Jewish. Dumped into empty stadiums or unfinished apartment complexes, these men, women and children — deemed threats to the nation — were eventually packed into French trains and shipped off to death camps.

Vichy response continue to come from some Republicans in the face of the irresponsible, immoral and incompetent Donald Trump failed leadership, but a few are speaking out, finally!

General James Mattis Denounces President Trump, Describes Him as a Threat to the Constitution "We do not need to militarize our response to protests. We need to unite around a common purpose", General James Mattis. 

General James Mattis

In an extraordinary condemnation, the former defense secretary backs protesters and says the president is trying to turn Americans against one another.

James Mattis, the esteemed Marine general who resigned as secretary of defense in December 2018 to protest Donald Trump’s Syria policy, has, ever since, kept studiously silent about Trump’s performance as president. But he has now broken his silence, writing an extraordinary broadside in which he denounces the president for dividing the nation, and accuses him of ordering the U.S. military to violate the constitutional rights of American citizens.

“I have watched this week’s unfolding events, angry and appalled,” Mattis writes. “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.” He goes on, “We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution.”

In his j’accuse, Mattis excoriates the president for setting Americans against one another. 

“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,” Mattis writes. “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.”

He goes on to contrast the American ethos of unity with Nazi ideology. “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.

Mattis’s dissatisfaction with Trump was no secret inside the Pentagon. But after his resignation, he argued publicly—and to great criticism—that it would be inappropriate and counterproductive for a former general, and a former Cabinet official, to criticize a sitting president. Doing so, he said, would threaten the apolitical nature of the military. When I interviewed him last year on this subject, he said, “When you leave an administration over clear policy differences, you need to give the people who are still there as much opportunity as possible to defend the country. They still have the responsibility of protecting this great big experiment of ours.” He did add, however: “There is a period in which I owe my silence. It’s not eternal. It’s not going to be forever.”

That period is now definitively over. Mattis reached the conclusion this past weekend that the American experiment is directly threatened by the actions of the president he once served. In his statement, Mattis makes it clear that the president’s response to the police killing of George Floyd, and the ensuing protests, triggered this public condemnation.

“When I joined the military, some 50 years ago,” he writes, “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.”

He goes on to implicitly criticize the current secretary of defense, Mark Esper, and other senior officials as well. “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.

Here is the text of the complete statement.

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 rightsof 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.

Echo opinion letter from Abilene Texas - Freedom of Speech

This echo opinion letter was published in the Abilene Reporter News, with quotes from patriotic leaders.  An interesting letter written from a reader in a Republican leaning Texas community.

ABILENE, Texas: The U.S. Senate unanimously passed a resolution affirming “the press is not the enemy of the people” and condemning “attacks on the institution of the free press” (Aug. 16) - a direct refutation of the pernicious president's contemptible claim the press is “the enemy of the people.”

The U.S. president's sworn oath includes “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.” The Constitution prohibits lawfully “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

“Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech.” (Benjamin Franklin, 1722).

“Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.” (Thomas Jefferson, 1786).

“The freedom of the Press is one of the greatest bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic governments.” (James Madison, 1789).

“In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors.” (US Supreme Court, New York Times v. United States, 403 US 713, 1971).

“Freedom of the Press is one of our most important freedoms and also one of our oldest.” (Ronald Reagan, 1985).

“If you want to preserve democracy as we know it, you have to have a free - and many times adversarial - press. 

And without it, I am afraid that we would lose so much of our individual liberties over time.” (John McCain, 2017 – who the draft dodger president disrespectfully denied was an American military hero).

— John Compere, Baird

George Will on immigration - a "buried lead"

George Will

Conservative pundit George Will wrote an interesting review about the history of American immigration policy, published in The Bismark Tribune. As a critic of Mr. Will's thoughtful opinions, I'm applauding his "buried lead".  

In other words, the history essay should have led with the middle of the narrative and finished with his opening paragraph. Instead, Mr. Will put the past first and the present last. Not a good technique.

Therefore, I'm submitting my reorganized George Will column. This routine editing process should be familiar to Mr. Will, because all of us have endured it, at one time or another, especially in our Journalism 101 academic classes.

Immigration policy among country's oldest debates

WASHINGTON - "In 1790, the finest mind in the First Congress, and of his generation, addressed in the House of Representatives the immigration issue: "It is no doubt very desirable that we should hold out as many inducements as possible for the worthy part of mankind to come and settle amongst us." ~ James Madison (editor's revision ~ jump to the middle of the essay....)

The border was irrelevant to the 42 percent of illegal immigrants who entered the U.S., mostly at airports, with valid visas that they then overstayed. Spending on border security quadrupled in the 1990s, then tripled in the next decade. Now that net immigration of Mexicans has been negative for 10 years, Americans eager to build a wall should not build it on the 1,984-mile U.S.-Mexico border but on the 541-mile Mexico-Guatemala border.

Fifty-eight percent of the more than 11 million -- down from 12.2 million in 2007 -- who are here illegally have been here at least 10 years; 31 percent are homeowners; 33 percent have children who, having been born here, are citizens. The nation would recoil from the police measures that would be necessary to extract these people from the communities into the fabric of which their lives are woven. They are not going home; they are home.

After 9/11, attitudes about immigration became entangled with policies about terrorism. So, as The Economist noted, "a mass murder committed by mostly Saudi terrorists resulted in an almost limitless amount of money being made available for the deportation of Mexican house-painters." This month, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided 98 7-Eleven stores in 17 states, making 21 arrests, approximately one for every 4.5 stores. Rome was not built in a day and it would be unreasonable to expect the government to guarantee, in one fell swoop, that only American citizens will hold jobs dispensing Slurpees and Big Gulps.

.....and here is the opening of Mr. Will's interesting immigration history review:

Perhaps today's 115th Congress will resume the Perhaps today's 115th Congress will resume the *Sisyphean task* (OMG ~ another intellectual "Willism"*) of continuing one of America's oldest debates, in which James Madison was an early participant: By what criteria should we decide who is worthy to come amongst us?

The antecedents of the pronouns "we" and "us" include the almost 80 million who are either immigrants -- not excluding the more than 11 million undocumented ones -- or their children. They might be amused to learn that in the only full-length book Thomas Jefferson wrote, "Notes on the State of Virginia," he worried that too many immigrants might be coming from Europe with monarchical principles "imbibed in their early youth," ideas that might turn America into "a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass."

A century later, Theodore Roosevelt, who detested "milk-and-water cosmopolitanism," saw virtue emerging from struggles between the "Anglo-Saxon" race and what Roosevelt's friend and soulmate Rudyard Kipling called "lesser breeds without the law." TR, who worried that the United States was becoming a "polyglot boarding house," supported America's first significant legislation restricting immigration, passed to exclude Chinese, because he thought Chinese laborers would depress American wages, and because he believed they would be "ruinous to the white race."

In 1902, in the final volume of professor Woodrow Wilson's widely-read book "A History of the American People," he contrasted "the sturdy stocks of the north of Europe" -- e.g., Norwegians -- with southern and eastern Europeans who had "neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence." U.S. Army data gathered during World War I mobilization demonstrated, according to a Princeton psychologist, "the intellectual superiority of our Nordic group over the Mediterranean, Alpine and Negro groups." Richard T. Ely, a leading progressive economist, spent most of his academic career at the University of Wisconsin, but first taught at Johns Hopkins, where one of his students was Woodrow Wilson. Ely celebrated the Army data for enabling the nation to inventory its human stock just as it does its livestock. In 1924, Congress legislated severe immigration restrictions, which excluded immigrants from an "Asiatic Barred Zone."

For more on this unsavory subject, read "Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era," by Princeton economist Thomas C. Leonard. And "One Nation Undecided" by Peter H. Schuck, professor emeritus at Yale Law School, who writes: "In what may be the cruelest single action in our immigration history, Congress defeated a bill in 1939 to rescue 20,000 children from Nazi Germany despite American families' eagerness to sponsor them -- on the ground that the children would exceed Germany's quota!"

The next phase of America's immigration debate, like the previous one, will generate the most heat about border security and whether those who are here illegally should stay. 

Unfortunately, the heat will be disproportionate to the task of continuing one of America's oldest debates, in which James Madison was an early participant: By what criteria should we decide who is worthy to come amongst us?

The antecedents of the pronouns "we" and "us" include the almost 80 million who are either immigrants -- not excluding the more than 11 million undocumented ones -- or their children. 

Immigrants among us might be amused to learn that in the only full-length book Thomas Jefferson wrote, "Notes on the State of Virginia," he worried that too many immigrants might be coming from Europe with monarchical principles "imbibed in their early youth," ideas that might turn America into "a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass."

A century later, Theodore Roosevelt, who detested "milk-and-water cosmopolitanism," saw virtue emerging from struggles between the "Anglo-Saxon" race and what Roosevelt's friend and soulmate Rudyard Kipling called "lesser breeds without the law." TR, who worried that the United States was becoming a "polyglot boarding house," supported America's first significant legislation restricting immigration, passed to exclude Chinese, because he thought Chinese laborers would depress American wages, and because he believed they would be "ruinous to the white race."

In 1902, in the final volume of professor Woodrow Wilson's widely-read book "A History of the American People," he contrasted "the sturdy stocks of the north of Europe" -- e.g., Norwegians -- with southern and eastern Europeans who had "neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence." U.S. Army data gathered during World War I mobilization demonstrated, according to a Princeton psychologist, "the intellectual superiority of our Nordic group over the Mediterranean, Alpine and Negro groups." Richard T. Ely, a leading progressive economist, spent most of his academic career at the University of Wisconsin, but first taught at Johns Hopkins, where one of his students was Woodrow Wilson. Ely celebrated the Army data for enabling the nation to inventory its human stock just as it does its livestock. In 1924, Congress legislated severe immigration restrictions, which excluded immigrants from an "Asiatic Barred Zone."

MaineWriter postscript:  Republicans who fixate their political rhetoric on the subject of immigration are advised to follow the advice of Maine's 19th century governor and Civil War hero Lt. General and the Honorable Joshua Chamberlain (1828-1914):  

“Loyalty then, is not mere conformity. It is fidelity; truth to faith; constancy of soul. Its true action is not constrained obedience to a superior, but the keeping of a covenant; free forthgiving to an answering ideal of right and good, to which one is spiritually bound.”

*Sisyphean - term for a task that is endless and ineffective comes straight out of Greek myth. Sisyphus was a king of Corinth, a son of Aeolus (the ruler of the winds, hence our word aeolian for something produced by or borne on the wind).

Republicans learned nothing from bad economic history

Unfortunately, the middle class tax payers are not heard by Congress. Tax cuts for the rich will never trickle down to help middle class Americans. In fact, the opposite effect is probably destined to happen, as the wealthy stash their cash and the middle class will pay for their greed. We know this from reading recent economics histories, as described by James Livingston, who teaches history at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, published in the History News Network.

Speaker Paul Ryan must be ashamed of himself. His own mother relied on widow's Social Security to help raise him and her family after the father unexpectedly died.

How many times do you have to say this is wrong? 

This tax bill is bad for everybody except the rich people who get to keep more of their money and the corporations who already have too much of it, anyway. So what?

Start with this—try not to give a damn about personal income taxes. The real issue is corporate income taxes. Start over with this—Grover Norquist and his crew, which is by now the Republican Party, believe that taxes as such are unjustified theft of earned income. They are deranged, and they should be so defined. Otherwise, we play by their rules.

Income taxes, whether personal or corporate, are, by definition, a way of transferring income from the rich to the poor. They are also, by definition, a product of an age of surplus, when we can afford to be our brother’s keeper. Social purposes become actionable when that happens, when we can afford them as both emotional and economic possibilities. We’ve known that since 1913, when the personal income tax became lawful. – and maybe a century or so before then, when the abolitionists told us that there could be no property in human beings.

So the bargain struck here, with this new tax bill driven by Republican votes, repudiates the social contract we have assumed for too long. It also repudiates the 20th century, historically speaking, by denying the benefits of equality, in terms of income, race, or gender.

You don’t need me to tell you that the income effects of this bill will be awful—except for the wealthy, who can afford to send their kids to graduate school, or can deduct those pass through payments because they’re already incorporated. 

Read Paul Krugman, or Simon Johnson, or anybody else with a brain not determined by devotion to Say’s Law.

But you do need to understand that the Republican assault on decency is not driven by mere greed. It’s a rational plan to shift income shares from labor to capital, from consumption to saving and investment, just as Reagan’s tax cuts were designed to do, on the assumption that this shift will create jobs, drive growth, and renew American initiative.
In theory, it makes perfect sense. In practice, it’s made for disaster since 1983. Every economic crisis since Reagan’s tax cuts, including the debacle we call the Great Recession, is the effect of those supply-side policies, because they just added to what Ben Bernanke once called the “global savings glut”—surplus capital seeking a better return, even in markets that were totally speculative, like the downriver mortgage market once know as “derivatives.”

Net private investment declined after the Reagan tax cuts, as did the rate of job growth. The “boom” of the 1980s was driven by deficit spending—government spending—as Peter G. Peterson, he of Blackstone fame, kept saying back then, and keeps saying, even now. The fact is that private investment has almost nothing to do with job creation and economic growth.

So, as policy, supply-side economics hasn’t worked—the evidence is overwhelming. Why, then, do the Republicans still insist on its practicality?

It’s a moral question fit for philosophers. As a mere historian, I’m incapable of an answer, except to say that they—Republicans, not philosophers, but what’s the difference?—can’t acknowledge the benefits of taxation or equality, or modernity as such.

The Republicans insist that a demolition of the so-called welfare state will restore a moral order in which individuals have the choices they enjoyed before the market was regulated, or overruled, by governmental fiat. They posit individuals and markets that are long since gone—those of the 19th century kind. In this sense, they are, in fact, populists, hoping to reinstate a centrifugal social system that validated small holders and their anti-statist politics.

They can’t (yet) believe that justice resides in the remediation of inequality by the state, when and where necessary, because liberty itself is endangered by inequality. They can’t (yet) understand that the founders, as flawed as they were, knew that every republic before theirs, ancient or modern, had foundered on this very shoal.

“The poor were sacrificed to the rich,” as James Madison put it in his long letter of 1787, to Thomas Jefferson, explaining why every previous republic had failed. The rights of property had replaced the rights of persons, he said, and this was the death knell of them all.

Liberty cannot survive the eclipse of equality, that’s what the founders knew. The Republicans have forgotten this original intent, and their tax bill proves the loss of historical memory. Would that such social amnesia wasn’t so destructive—of everything we hold dear, from family to society to nation, as in we, the people.