"A Republic if you can keep it" said Benjamin Franklin

A prophetic editorial echo worth an encore in this blog by Maine Writer. Published in The Seattle Times in April 2022, but the intentions of this opinion essay (below) continue to be relevant to our democracy.

Prelude: After the violent events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, one year ago today, Senator Amy Klobuchar and other federal legislators reminded us that we have “a republic,” but only “if you can keep it.” The source of this quotation is a journal kept by James McHenry (1753-1816) while he was a Maryland delegate to the Constitutional Convention. On the page where McHenry records the events of the last day of the convention, September 18, 1787, he wrote: “A lady asked Dr. Franklin Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy – A republic replied the Doctor if you can keep it.” Then McHenry added: “The Lady here alluded to was Mrs. Powel of Philada.” The journal is at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress.

Congress must stop efforts to defraud democracy.

By The Seattle Times editorial board

A violent mob (motivated by the former guy #tfg #djt) invaded the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, spurred on by false claims of a stolen election. The invaders were incensed that Vice President Mike Pence refused to exploit ambiguities in the process of certifying Electoral College results — flaws in the law that could have plunged America into chaos.

A group of senators led by Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., have taken the first step in what must continue to be a bipartisan quest to protect the will of the voter. They introduced the Electoral Count Reform Act to help prevent future schemes to defraud democracy.

Former President Donald Trump’s efforts to remain in office were successfully thwarted after the 2020 election, but there is no guarantee that he — or one of his followers — would not try again. If anything, the possibility is growing as his acolytes continue to vie for positions of power, including overseeing elections.

Legislation, which had gathered enough GOP support to bypass a filibuster, would clarify aspects of the Electoral Count Act of 1887, removing the vagueness that Trump and his cohorts tried to exploit.

The bill would affirm that the vice president’s role in the electoral count is only ministerial and make it harder for members of Congress to object to a state’s electors. Currently, all it takes is one member in the House and one in the Senate for an objection to proceed, a requirement that would increase to at least one-fifth of the members in each chamber, under the proposal.

Additionally, the bill intended to thwart attempts by rogue state legislatures to submit different electors by giving governors conclusive authority to certify their state’s electoral slate. However, it also allows for candidates to petition for judicial review in cases of legitimate controversy.

Philadelphia, 1787. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention are just leaving Independence Hall, having decided on the general structure for the new United States. A crowd had gathered on the steps of Independence Hall, eager to hear the news. A sturdy old woman (sometimes referred to as “an anxious lady”), wearing a shawl, approached Benjamin Franklin and asked him, “well, Doctor, what do we have, a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin replied sagely, “a republic, if you can keep it.”


The Senate should pay attention to election experts who have pointed out the importance is implementing enhanced safeguards against the unfortunately plausible scenario of election-denying governors and state legislative majorities.

Fixing the Electoral Count Act is a critical component of ensuring election integrity, but it is far from the final word. As pointed out by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan public policy institute, the law applies only to presidential races and doesn’t address broader national threats, including intimidation of election workers and efforts to manipulate the vote counting process.

The Senate should pass legislation such as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore and update the 1965, Voting Rights Act protections that were gutted by the U.S. Supreme Court, including prohibiting race-based discrimination in voting. Republican leadership blocked debate on the bill last year, with only Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, voting to advance discussion.

Congress is on the right track with the Electoral Count Reform Act, but the bipartisan momentum must reach further if the U.S. is to ensure that the events of January 6 weren’t a dress rehearsal.

The Seattle Times editorial board members are editorial page editor Kate Riley, Frank A. Blethen, Melissa Davis, Alex Fryer, Claudia Rowe, Carlton Winfrey and William K. Blethen (emeritus).

What do you call two Congresswomen who engage in a public cat fight? It is a Freedom Caucus rupture

(And in this corner....!)...the Lauren Boebert vs. Marjorie Taylor Greene fight isn't just happening in a ladies' bathroom anymore — it's out on the House floor and uglier than before.

So, let me get this right? Congresswoman (former night shift street walker) Marjorie Taylor Greene was so bad that she was voted out of her own right wing caucus?  In other words, MTG is too extreme even for the extremists?  Now out in the public, Boebert and Greene have actually been feuding for months.  (Reported by Cheryl Teh for Insider)

The House Freedom Caucus voted to remove Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from the pro-Trump group last month, a member confirmed Thursday, indicating that her fight with Rep. Lauren Boebert was part of the group’s reasoning.

Decorum is not in their vocabulary

Marjorie Taylor Greene Sh-t-Talking Lauren Boebert Apparently a Bridge Too Far for Freedom Caucus, reported by Eric Lutz in Vanity Fair.

“A vote was taken to remove Marjorie Taylor Greene from the House Freedom Caucus for some of the things she’s done,” said Freedom Caucus board member Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.). When asked if she was formally out, he replied: “As far as I know, that is the way it is

It’s the first public confirmation of Greene’s fate within the conservative group. (AhhhHa.....a right wing political cat fight!)

Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert behave like politically rabid ladies of the night.

The vote was first reported by POLITICO, though it was unclear at the time whether she had been ejected. It took place less than two days after Greene got into a verbal floor fight with Freedom Caucus member Boebert, during which Greene referred to the Colorado Republican as a “little bitch.” After the exchange was first reported, Greene confirmed the fight and doubled down, adding another pejorative.

The two have clashed repeatedly in the past, but Harris indicated that particular spat had factored into the conservative group’s thinking.

“I think the way she referred to a fellow member was probably not the way we expect our members to refer to other fellow, especially female, members,” Harris said Thursday. The Maryland Republican declined to say how he voted but called the decision to remove her “an appropriate action.”

It’s the first time the conservative caucus has booted one of its own and reflects the group’s increasing level of frustration with Greene. She’s closely allied herself with Speaker Kevin McCarthy this year, lining up against many Freedom Caucus members when she supported both his rocky speakership bid and his debt deal with President Joe Biden. At the same time, the group is working through a post-Trump crossroads, with some fretting the group is at risk of becoming too friendly with the party establishment.

Asked if her support for McCarthy and the debt deal fed into the decision to remove her from the group, Harris replied: “I think all of that mattered.”

“I think the straw that broke the camel’s back was publicly saying things about another member in terms that no one should,” he said.

A Freedom Caucus spokesperson declined to comment on Greene’s status, noting that the group doesn’t comment on membership or internal processes. 

For her part, Greene did not directly address her Freedom Caucus membership in a statement on Thursday, instead saying that: “In Congress, I serve Northwest Georgia first, and serve no group in Washington.”

“The GOP has less than two years to show America what a strong, unified Republican-led Congress will do when President Trump wins the White House, in 2024. This is my focus, nothing else,” she added.

Greene typically attends the group’s weekly off-campus meeting. But that closed-door gathering is limited to members, meaning she would no longer be able to attend.

While it’s the first time the group has formally voted to remove a member from its ranks, she’s not the first to leave. Then-Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan previously quit the group in 2019, and left the Republican Party shortly after. Harris noted that there was “one other member a couple of years ago, who we probably would have asked to leave, but we just decided not to.”

And it might not end at Greene. There’s been discussion about targeting a handful of members beyond the Georgia Republican, who critics see as violating group standards by being inactive. 

House Freedom Caucus Chair Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) previously told POLITICO that he had denied those purge requests, which came before the vote to remove Greene.

“The speaker’s race, there was some difference in opinion. The debt ceiling, there were differences of opinion. And we had to get 80 percent on any major issue that we take positions on,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), a Freedom Caucus member, previously told POLITICO, referring to the threshold needed for the group to take a unified stance. “On some big issues, we have not been able to get there.”

The group is currently at the center of the fight over government funding as they try to push McCarthy and members of leadership to go below levels set in the debt deal and to hold the line when he, ultimately, has to negotiate with the White House and Senate Democrats.

Though the group is largely unified on wanting lower spending, they’ve also haggled in private about what their strategy should be after they cut a deal with McCarthy to end a weeklong standoff that ground the House floor to a halt.

Harris, however, argued that, after booting Greene, there were no other remaining “large divisions” and praised Perry.

“This wasn’t even a speed bump,” Harris added. 

Olivia Beavers contributed to this report.

George Santos is a Trumpzi Frankenstein

Echo opinion published in the Seattle Times, by the New York Times columnist David Brooks:

Donald Trump's political Frankenstein:

George Santos is following the Donald Trump model - do ALL the political harm you can and the corrupt GOP will bring you back to life again. 

The Sad Tale of (Pathetic) George Santos (Maine Writer opinion- Santos is a phony!)

What would it be like to be so ashamed of your life that you felt compelled to invent a new one? (In other word "lie" about who you are and the heritage you inherited.  "Who knew?" 😏😝😡)

Most of us don’t feel compelled to do that. Most of us take the actual events of our lives, including the failures and frailties, and we gradually construct coherent narratives about who we are. Those autobiographical narratives are always being updated as time passes — and, of course, tend to be at least modestly self-flattering. 

Yet, for most of us, the life narrative we tell both the world and ourselves gives us a stable sense of identity. It helps us name what we’ve learned from experience and what meaning our life holds. It helps us make our biggest decisions. As philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre once observed, you can’t know what to do unless you know what story you are a part of.

A reasonably accurate and coherent autobiographical narrative is one of the most important things a person can have. If you don’t have a real story, you don’t have a real self.

George Santos, on the other hand, is a young man who apparently felt compelled to jettison much of his actual life and replace it with fantasy. As Grace Ashford and Michael Gold of The New York Times have been reporting, in his successful run for Congress this year Santos claimed he had a college degree that he does not have. Moreover, ee claimed he held jobs that he did not hold. He claimed he owned properties he apparently does not own. He claims he never committed check fraud, though the Times unearthed court records suggesting he did. He claims he never described himself as Jewish, merely as adjacently “Jew-ish.”  A self-described gay man, he hid a years long heterosexual marriage that ended in 2019. 

George Santos is a fraud, ya' think?

All politicians — perhaps all humans — embellish. But what Santos did goes beyond that. He fabricated a new persona, that of a meritocratic superman. He claims to be a populist who hates the elites, but he wanted you to think he once worked at Goldman Sachs. Imagine how much inadequacy you’d have to feel to go to all that trouble.

I can’t feel much anger toward Santos for his deceptiveness, just a bit of sorrow. ("bit"? of sorrow?~ I don't think so...!)

Maine Writer- I disagree with David Brooks. I do NOT think Santos deserves any sympathy.

Cutting yourself off to that degree from the bedrock of the truth renders your whole life unstable. 

Santos made his own past unreliable, perpetually up for grabs. But when you do that you also eliminate any coherent vision of your future. People may wonder how Santos could have been so dumb. In political life, his fabrications were bound to be discovered. Perhaps it’s because dissemblers often have trouble anticipating the future; they’re stuck in the right now.

In a sense Santos is a sad, farcical version of where President Donald Trump has taken the Republican Party — into the land of unreality, the continent of lies. Trump’s takeover of the GOP was not primarily an ideological takeover, it was a psychological and moral one. I don’t feel sorry for Trump the way I do for Santos, because Trump is so cruel. But he did introduce, on a much larger scale, the same pathetic note into our national psychology.

In his book, “The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump,” the eminent personality psychologist Dan McAdams argues that Trump could continually lie to himself because he had no actual sense of himself. There was no real person, inner life or autobiographical narrative to betray. McAdams quotes people who had been close to Trump who reported that being with him wasn’t like being with a conventional person; it was like being with an entity who was playing the role of Donald Trump. And that role had no sense of continuity. He was fully immersed in whatever dominance battle he was fighting at that moment.

McAdams calls Trump an “episodic man,” who experiences life as a series of disjointed moments, not as a coherent narrative flow of consciousness. “He does not look to what may lie ahead, at least not very far ahead,” McAdams writes. “Trump is not introspective, retrospective or prospective. There is no depth; there is no past; there is no future.”

America has always had impostors and people who reinvented their pasts. (If he were real, Jay Gatsby might have lived — estimations of the precise locations of the fictional East and West Egg vary — in what is now Santos’ district.) This feels different. I wonder if the era of the short-attention spans and the online avatars is creating a new character type: the person who doesn’t experience life as an accumulation over decades, but just as a series of disjointed performances in the here and now, with an echo of hollowness inside.

This week Santos tried to do a bit of damage control in a series of interviews, including with WABC radio in New York. The whole conversation had an air of unreality. Santos was rambling, evasive and haphazard, readjusting his stories in a vague, fluid way. The host, John Catsimatidis, wasn’t questioning him the way a journalist might. He was practically coaching Santos on what to say. The troubling question of personal integrity was not on anybody’s radar screen. And then the conversation reached a Tom Wolfe-ian crescendo when former Rep. Anthony Weiner suddenly appeared — and turned out to be the only semi-competent interviewer in the room.

Karl Marx famously said that under the influence of capitalism, all that’s solid melts into air. I wonder if some elixir of Trumpian influence and online modernity can have the same effect on individual personalities.

David Brooks is a regular columnist for The New York Times.