SUBPOENA? DON’T MAKE ME LAUGH!

 

One of the many rules of civilized government for which the former Trump administration has demonstrated authoritarian disdain is the power of Congress to subpoena both material evidence and witness testimony pertaining to the investigations of its committees and subcommittees. A hallmark of the Trump regime’s former and continuing authoritarianism has been its utter disdain for the three-branch system of checks and balances to guarantee the integrity of representative democracy.

And nowhere has that disdain been more derisive than in the refusal of Trump administration officials and former Trump aides to comply with congressional subpoenas. Indeed, Trump’s attorney general (clearly Trump’s, not the nation’s) William Barr scoffed at threats by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to cite Trump officials including himself for contempt of Congress, actually daring her to go ahead. It was a “make my day moment” for a Justice Department placed by its chief at the service of one man rather than that of the nation.

The fact is that, up to the time of this new era of anti-democratic decay, mutual compliance among the three branches of government has been largely based on common respect and on everyone’s being on the same page when it came to the importance of maintaining the sanctity of the democratic process. And the forty-four men who preceded Trump in office, though some more compliant than others, understood that, in the end, the main duty of their administrations was to protect and serve the democratic institutions on which the United States was founded. In short, to hold sacred the provisions of the US Constitution. Not even Richard Nixon was willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater and resigned rather than face impeachment.

But the Trump era has been, and continues to be—since one would have to be an eternal optimist, or would have to live in a fantasy world even more clueless than that of “the base” itself, to think that the Trump era is over—the greatest test since the Civil War of American democracy’s resilience in the face of internal threats to its integrity. Trump and his political cohorts have shown utter disregard and disrespect for the Constitution and for the time-honored traditions of American democratic and patriotic zeal, even to the extent of flouting the most basic tradition of all: the peaceful transition of power and acceptance of the outcome of free and fair elections. They have gone beyond anything Americans could ever have imagined in their worst nightmares by actually seeking to incite and then seeking to excuse an insurrection aimed at toppling the established order. 

Anyone who is still asking if “we might be in danger of a constitutional crisis” isn’t paying attention. We are in the midst of one. We have been ever since the former president refused to concede his loss of the 2020 election and made the seditious decision to incite his followers to go to Congress and remind the vice president, in his role as president of the Senate, where his loyalties should lie—clearly not with the United States, but with Trump World.

The idea of any of the anti-democratic actors in Congress and in the Executive Branch who were behind the January Sixth Insurrection (which is how, if historians are honest, it should be remembered in the history of the United States) not just being cited for, but being convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to obey a congressional subpoena seems naïve to say the least. Even prior to the Trump regime, compliance with congressional subpoenas was pretty much based on the honors system. And in Washington, the threat of someone’s being charged with contempt has been, over the last several decades, barely more of a deterrent to non-compliance than a parking ticket.

Congress in theory has the faculty to impose fines and jail-time for contempt. But the sergeant at arms no longer has a calaboose in the Capitol, and Congress hasn’t done so against a government official since the 1920s and 1930s, when those who were cited basically got a slap on the wrist. “Civilians” are another issue altogether. Congress famously jailed and fined members of the Hollywood acting, producing, directing and writing communities during the McCarthy communist witch-hunt in the mid-1900s, whenever those called to testify refused to go before Congress or refused to rat on their colleagues.

The sentencing of the Hollywood Ten to a year
in prison rocked Hollywood for years to come.

The most iconic case of that dark era in American politics was that of the so-called Hollywood Ten. In that case, the House voted 346 to 17 to cite ten Hollywood writers, directors, and producers for contempt. These ten men, including Albert Maltz, Dalton Trumbo, John Howard Lawson, Samuel Ornitz, Ring Lardner, Jr., Lester Cole, Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Edward Dmytryk, and Robert Adrian Scott, refused to cooperate at McCarthy’s anti-communist hearings, when the House Un-American Activities Committee was probing communist influence in the film industry.

Although the ten said in their defense that they were only defending their First Amendment right to free expression by refusing to answer inappropriate questioning about their political affiliations, the Supreme Court upheld the congressional contempt conviction and they were sentenced to a year in prison. This was clearly an abuse of congressional powers and a legal travesty that led to an unprecedented level of self-censorship in the motion picture industry and to the black-listing of anyone with even vaguely left-wing views. That climate of suspicion and terror lasted in Hollywood from the late 1940s until the 1960s, during which time dozens of lives and careers in the film industry were ruined.

But no such stricture has been in evidence within politicians’ own community for a very long time. This has probably been the case because issues among them are less about the law and legal procedures and more about not doing something to members of another party that they will be able to do back to you when their party is in charge. The great difference is, however, that while the so-called Red threat to American democracy was, by and large, manufactured in the fevered minds of far-right zealots, the threat to democracy that the country is facing today is quite real. It is, indeed, a clear and present danger to constitutional democracy.

Bannon

Getting down to brass tacks, this is what’s happening: The House Select Committee investigating the January Sixth Insurrection has sought to issue subpoenas to former Trump officials including former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Defense Department official Kash Patel, one-time White House adviser (and Trump Rasputin) Steve Bannon, and former Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications Dan Scavino, calling on them to testify regarding the events of January 6^th of this year. Trump has sent a letter to all of these men calling on them to simply ignore the subpoenas.

So far, none of them has complied with the subpoenas to hand over related documentation and they have now been scheduled to testify before the committee next week, after missing a documentation compliance deadline set for last Thursday. Scavino has, in fact, taken his former boss’s non-compliance order so seriously that he has been living like a fugitive, holing-up at an unknown location so that he can’t be served the subpoena.

Nor does Bannon’s claim of “executive privilege” hold water, because he had long since left the Trump administration by the time of the events of January 6, 2021, but was nevertheless alleged to have been in contact with the former president, encouraging him to push the storming of the Capitol.  

The watch word here, in general, is “privilege”, executive privilege to be precise, which Trump claims to still command and which he is invoking as the reason for urging his former aides not to comply with the probe. But does executive privilege apply in Trump’s case, or in the case of any former president?

While Trump sycophants are seeking to make a case for it, constitutional law experts apparently agree that Trump has no executive privilege. Privilege, in fact, doesn’t really belong to the president—any president—but is a faculty of the United States of America, which, as such, is only exercised by the current president. A former president may offer an opinion to the incumbent executive regarding questions of privilege during his former administration, but he has no power whatsoever to compel the current president to conserve that privilege, period. And even less so if that privilege is being used to cover up potentially criminal activities.

But here’s the rub. In modern times—or at least since the McCarthy era—Congress has all but relinquished its power to invoke its faculty for punishing “inherent contempt” directly, even though, under federal law, it can fine offenders up to a hundred thousand dollars and/or send them to prison for a year, instead referring any and all citations of criminal or civil contempt of Congress to the courts. The problem with that is that the legal procedures involved are notoriously slow.

McGahn - "Crazy shit"

For instance, when former Trump White House Attorney Don McGahn was subpoenaed to testify before Congress after it was revealed that he had told other Trump aides that he was refusing to do all of “the crazy shit” Trump was ordering him to do—including an attempt to sack special investigator Robert Mueller—Trump immediately invoked “executive privilege” and blocked the attorney from testifying in Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 elections. The House sued to get McGahn to testify, but the ensuing legal battle bounced around in the courts for a total of 25 months before, finally, in June of this year, the attorney testified behind closed doors, far too late, obviously, to do any good in stopping Trump from doing even more “crazy shit”, as witnessed by the events of January 6^th.

This doesn’t bode well for getting former Trump aides to testify in the current probe, since the House is playing “beat the clock” with mid-term elections to take place in November of next year. Why? Because if the GOP manages to take over the House, which well they could, the January 6^th investigation will be dead in the water.

There are those, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who want to bring back undiluted “inherent contempt” action in Congress. And constitutional experts indicate that the only thing keeping that from happening is majority will.

Constitutional law expert Kia Rahnama has written: “…(T)here is clear legal precedent that all but endorses such power. The Supreme Court has consistently analogized between the congressional contempt power and the judiciary’s contempt power. For example, in McGrain v Daugherty (1927) the (Supreme) Court was asked to review whether an unsworn committee report could form the basis for a warrant issued by a Senate investigation subcommittee; the Court agreed that Congress had that power because the courts of law followed the same practice. In Juney v McCracken (1935), the Supreme Court clearly stated that the power of Congress to punish for contempt is ‘governed by the same principles as the power of the judiciary to punish for contempt.’ Similarly, in Kilbourn v Thompson (1880)—concerning Congress’s impeachment powers, which follow the same quasi-judicial procedures as contempt proceedings—the Supreme Court stated that Congress should be able to conduct investigations ‘in the same manner and by the use of the same means that courts of justice can in like cases.’ The Court then, in dicta, stated that this would logically give Congress the power to punish by ‘fine or imprisonment,’ the same options being available to courts.”

The only question, then, appears to be, will Democrats in general and the Biden administration and attorney general’s office in particular, make the hard decisions necessary to get democracy back on track, and quite possibly save the United States from authoritarianism, at the possible expense of their political careers? Or will they dissemble, as they have to date, in the face of Donald Trump’s assault on democracy and of the authoritarian designs at work in the GOP? 

 

CUTTING OFF OUR NOSE TO SPITE OUR FACE

 The Durham probe that former Attorney General William Barr ordered in 2019 is an iconic symbol of a political war being waged in the United States. After 873 days (and counting) of investigating the investigators in the Mueller inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 elections, John Durham’s search for dirt on those aiding Robert Mueller in his look into any link between Donald Trump’s election campaign and Russian hackers who sought to swing the 2016 results in the former president’s favor has finally led to the announcement of only its second indictment.

William Barr (left) and John Durham

Durham’s probe was billed by both Barr and Trump as a blockbuster investigation that would uncover a plot by top Democrats to undermine the election results that brought Trump to power. Indeed, Trump at one point said that the investigation would reveal “the greatest political crime in American history.”

But after spending 200 more days investigating investigators than Mueller did probing the Russia connection, Durham has been unable to indict any recognizable faces from the Democratic camp or the FBI for impropriety in the handling of the Russian interference inquiry. It was only this past week when his office was finally able to secure a grand jury indictment against attorney Michael Sussman, a specialist in cyber-security, who in 2016 raised his suspicions with the FBI about what he claimed were secretly channeled data allegedly linking the Trump business empire to the Alfa Bank of Russia. Ultimately, the FBI said that there was “insufficient evidence” to bring charges based on the data provided by Sussmann.

But that isn’t the basis for Durham’s indictment of the attorney. Instead, Sussman is accused of telling the FBI’s chief counsel, James Baker, that he was coming forth as a “good citizen” when, according to the Durham probe’s allegations, Sussman was actually working for a technology company executive and for Trump opponent Hillary Clinton’s campaign when he took his story to the FBI. Durham claims, therefore, that Sussman lied to the FBI, which is a felony. Last Friday, Sussman pleaded not guilty to the charge.

The only conviction Durham has been able to achieve to date was of a low-level FBI attorney named Kevin Clinesmith. Clinesmith was indicted for and later convicted of doctoring an internal FBI e-mail memo in order to secure a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Agency (FISA) Court warrant to investigate Carter Page, a former Trump foreign policy adviser.  In sentencing Clinesmith, Federal District Court Judge James Boasberg—who also was the federal judge presiding over the FISA Court, and whom you might recall as the Republican-appointed judge who in 2016 ordered the release by the FBI to the conservative legal group Judicial Watch of more than 14,000 State Department emails found on Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server—made it clear that while Clinesmith had committed a serious offense, considering other corroborative evidence presented, the FISA warrant application would likely have been approved anyway, without the attorney’s having presented adulterated evidence. He therefore declined to send Clinesmith to prison, handing him a year on probation and community service instead.

Robert Mueller

The Mueller investigation, for its part, did indeed produce both indictments (34) and solid convictions (including those of five Trump lieutenants), as well as eight guilty pleas with regard to Russian interference in US elections. Mueller made it clear that no indictment of Trump had been considered, for the simple reason that, in accordance with Justice Department guidelines, a sitting president cannot be indicted (not even under sealed indictment). The Mueller Report, which was the culmination of that 674-day probe, did not conclude that there had been no pro-Trump Russian interference in the 2016 elections. On the contrary, the Mueller investigative team indicted thirteen Russians—twelve who formed part of the Fancy Bear hacker team under orders from the Kremlin’s largest foreign espionage agency, the GRU, and who were charged with hacking the Democratic National Committee e-mail server and leaking their communications to the public.

The thirteenth Russian indicted by Mueller was businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, who was charged with financing the Russian hackers. All were charged in absentia and while it is unlikely they will ever be fully prosecuted in the US, the charges have hindered their travel abroad. A fourteenth Russian questioned by the Mueller investigation was Maria Butina, who posed as a Russian-born gun activist with ties to the NRA. Following her statements to the Mueller inquiry, she was arrested and prosecuted for acting as an unregistered agent of the Russian government under the provisions of the National Security Law, pleaded guilty, and ended up serving six months of an 18-month prison sentence.

All of this came in addition to indictments, during the second Trump impeachment inquiry, of Lev Parnas and Igor Furman, both born in the former Soviet Union, and both associates of Trump’s personal attorney and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The two were arrested by the FBI in connection with campaign funding violations—more specifically, setting up a shell company to launder a US$ 325,000 donation to the Trump campaign. Through a series of complicated investigations led by Republican campaign watchdog Trevor Potter and by energy sector businessman Dale Perry, it was discovered that both Parnas and Furman were intimately involved in Giuliani’s mission to dig up dirt on then candidate Joe Biden and his son in Ukraine, as well as in Giuliani’s successful attempt to have career diplomat Marie Yovanovitch removed as the US ambassador to that country.

Trump referred to Yovanovitch as being “bad news”. But in fact, Ambassador Yovanovitch had a long history of tackling corruption wherever she found it, and that was one of her priorities in Ukraine.

It is interesting to note that when charges were brought against Parnas and Furman, it was another former Trump lawyer, John Dowd, who became their defense counsel.

Pence, Furman, Parnas,Trump and Giuliani

In other words, while the majority of Republicans seek to bill the Mueller investigation into Russian interference as a political hit job cooked up by Democrats—Robert Mueller is, it should be noted, a lifelong Republican—the probe did indeed produce proof of Russian interference in US domestic affairs and established an at least prima facie association between Russia and Trump loyalists. The Durham Investigation, for its part, has so far not clearly demonstrated its reason for existing, since the two minor indictments produced to date could easily have been achieved without the creation of a special prosecutor’s investigation.

What is most interesting, and sad, about both investigations is that while the judicial bases behind them might be sound—i.e., to root out corruption in the highest spheres of government—the political climate behind them isn’t. As I said earlier, at their root, they are both political skirmishes in a so far cold (or perhaps tepid would be a better word) civil war that is ripping the fabric of America’s two-and-a-half-century-old democratic traditions down the middle.

This is not hyperbole on my part, but the conclusion of a growing number of noted political scientists. When I posited back in 2017 that the US had never been more divided since the actual Civil War, many acquaintances—both Republican and Democrat—on the social media showed skepticism, or openly scoffed at the idea. But since the January 6^th insurrection, many, among both traditional Republicans and Democrats, have come into line with my thinking and are gravely concerned about the fate of US democracy and domestic security in the foreseeable future.

One of those who subscribes to this view of history in the making is Academy and Peabody Award-winning documentary film director Ken Burns. Renowned for his research into such related topics as the Civil War, the Great Depression, World War II, Nazism in Europe, and the populist reign of Louisiana boss politician Huey “The Kingfish” Long, Burns literally views the current post-Trump presidency era as “the most divisive since the Civil War.”

According to Burns, US democracy is imminently endangered by an internal threat stemming from the inability of today’s Americans to agree on even the most basic of facts. There are already, he posits, casualties of war-like proportions as a result of these divisions if we consider that 676,000 Americans have died in the COVID epidemic (more than perished in the 1918 influenza plague, when there was no medical treatment for the disease), mainly because politicians, led by the former president, have so politicized the use of masks and highly effective and readily available vaccines that nearly half of the country’s population remains stubbornly opposed to public health policies enacted to save their lives.

But COVID deaths, 2,000 of them a day at present, are only one grim symptom of how politicians are pitting one broad sector of Americans against another and, in the process, mortally wounding American democratic traditions—as well as killing their fellow Americans. In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky posit that the breakdown of “mutual toleration” and respect for the political legitimacy of the opposition is a sure formula for murdering democracy. Above all, they point out, it is absolutely necessary for everyone involved in the political process to accept the results of free and fair elections. The basic cornerstone of US democracy is free and fair elections. If you respect even the most basic of democratic tenets, you don’t mess with that. And yet, over the course of the last five years, and especially in the last two, the country’s voting system has taken more hits than a subway turnstile. 

It is worthwhile recalling that they were writing this veritable textbook on how democracies are killed quite early on in the administration of Donald Trump. But their warning that contrary to these basic rules of democratic life were spurious complaints about election outcomes and, graver still, attempts to overthrow the established democratic order and replace it with an authoritarian regime now seems prescient. Their then largely academic proposal has since transformed into a cogent prediction, provided a full two years prior to the January 6^th Capitol insurrection and the perpetuation by Trump’s political cohorts of “the big lie” that has convinced a very large segment of the public that Democrats and President Joe Biden “stole” the 2020 election from Trump. Nearly a full year after that election, Trump keeps calling for the election results to be overturned, thus continuing to feed his most loyal base with a divisive lie that is perpetuating hatred between the two main American political camps.

And just how large is that democracy-dubious base? Polls suggest that more than 50 percent (some pollsters say more than 70 percent) of all Republicans—or about one in four American voters—believe that the 2020 presidential election was rigged and that Democrats in general and President Joe Biden in particular stole the presidency from their far-right populist icon, Donald Trump. As recently as this month, Trump has continued to call for the election to be overturned, thus revitalizing his own lie (or perhaps delusion) among his closest followers and leading them to believe that the system is corrupt, that democracy no longer works, and that perhaps the January 6^th insurrection was the way to go in seeking to “win back their rights and nation.”

Despite this narrative, seldom has representative democracy worked better than it did in the 2020 election. That’s not an opinion. It’s a proven fact. In spite of desperate efforts by Trump and his allies to sully election system credibility, that system and the results it yielded, numerous machine and hand recounts, some sixty court judgments and a Supreme Court rejection have all clearly demonstrated the accusations of Trump and his closest cohorts to be utterly and completely false. Worse still, all of this proof has shown the Trump camp’s machinations to be a ruse designed to fool the gullible within his base—who, it turns out, are incredibly numerous.

Even the long, tortuous, so-called “audit” carried out by the comic book-named Cyber-Ninjas in Arizona couldn’t make Trumpian accusations of voter fraud stick. That ghost-like firm that sprang up out of nowhere, financed with 5.7 million dollars in Trump-supporter donations, allegedly channeled to them mostly through prominent Trump camp figures like lawyer and confessed prevaricator Sidney Powell and disgraced retired Army general Michael Flynn, has had to confess in its final report, leaked to the press this week, that there was no evidence of fraud against Trump in that state’s election process. On the contrary, their meticulous and decidedly partisan look at Arizona’s crucial Maricopa County ended up demonstrating that Joe Biden had actually beaten Donald Trump there by an even wider margin than original tabulations revealed.

And yet, this past week, after unsuccessfully harassing the main states where he lost, Trump turned to places where he won, bullying Governor Greg Abbott of Texas into auditing election results in several cities where the former president is nursing the delusion that he should have done better. Clearly, to any reasonable person’s mind, the election has been over for eleven months now, the result is unquestionable and Joe Biden, everywhere but in Mar-a-Lago, is president of the Unites States.

What is happening right now in the US is tragic, not only for the Nation but also for Western democracy as a whole, particularly because it plays to the narrative of two of America’s staunchest rivals, the authoritarian regimes today governing China and Russia, both of which hold that democracy is a messy, recalcitrant and ineffective form of government that is highly overrated. The Trump era has provided them with ample reason to scoff and they are doing so with abandon. The current situation in America is made to order for their anti-American propaganda machine, because they no longer even have to lie. It really is as bad as they say it is.

It is hard to see how the two and a half-century-old experiment in American liberal democracy can survive when the leadership of one of the two main parties governing it has deformed its definition of “democracy” and molded its entire political platform to suit the whims and power-mad delusions of a single personality, much in the same way that the Nazi Party did in embracing the absolute power of Adolf Hitler. Furthermore, over the course of the last twelve years, the Republican political leadership has basically abandoned its duties—lawmaking and representation of the rights of its constituency—in favor of obstructionist practices designed specifically to keep much needed legislation from passing and, worse still, of political strategies developed to discredit and paralyze its political opponents.

Wyoming Rep.Liz Cheney

An obvious symptom of the GOP leadership’s giant leap into the abyss of authoritarianism is its ostracizing of all fellow Republicans who fail to fall in, rank and file, behind the autocratic figure of Donald Trump. Iconic examples of traditional Republican figures (and true liberal-democratic conservatives) who have fallen victim to this type of ostracism include, the late Senator John McCain, Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney, Utah Senator Mitt Romney, Illinois Representative Adam Kinzinger, Ohio Representative Anthony Gonzalez, and even, to a certain extent, former Vice President Mike Pence, to name just a few. Meanwhile, dangerous fascistoid radicals like Georgia Representative Majorie Taylor Green and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, who would have once been political pariahs among Republicans, are now party rock stars. 

Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green

Many expert political observers say that the only hope for the future of American democracy is for the Democratic Party to take advantage of the power that it wields right now—and perhaps not for more than a year to come—to try and shore up democracy, and make it less vulnerable to attack in the future. Especially considering plots in Red states in several areas of the country to ram through laws that will “keep what happened in 2020 from ever happening again.” Considering that the 2020 election has been repeatedly proven to be one of the fairest in history, the underlying meaning of this stated mission is, then, to ensure that elections are skewed to make certain that the GOP has brass knuckles in its glove the next time it steps into the ring with Democrats. 

And it matters not one iota to the current GOP chiefs that in order to win by hook or by crook they will be disenfranchising millions of American voters. On the contrary, their purpose is precisely that.

Missouri Sen.Josh Hawley

But I believe that the only way for democracy to survive in the current climate is for the purge of authoritarianism to come from within the conservative movement itself. And I’m not alone in this belief.

Back in May, some 150 former Republican officials sent an open-letter message to their party warning that if the GOP didn’t break with Donald Trump, they would back the creation of a third party. Miles Taylor, one of the organizers of this new conservative movement within the GOP, said at the time, “The Republican Party is broken. It's time for a resistance of the ‘rationals’ against the ‘radicals’.”

Taylor had already begun to resist Trump’s authoritarian designs while he was serving in the former president’s administration. A Trump appointee and former Bush administration staffer, he served from 2017 to 2019 as chief of staff for the Department of Homeland Security. He eventually outed himself as the Trump administration official who had written a 2018 anonymous op-ed in The New York Times entitled I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration. But the last straw for most of the rest of the signers of the ultimatum, which they entitled A Call for American Renewal, was the Trump-incited January 6^th insurrection at the Capitol.

The signers include four former governors and 27 former members of the House of Representatives, as well as Trump and Bush administration officials, diplomats and former high-ranking party officials. Among the most familiar names are former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, former National Security Agency chief General Michael Hayden, former homeland security director Michael Chertoff, Republican strategist William F.B. O’Reilly, former Representative Barbara Comstock, former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, and former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld.

The most high-profile opponent to the Trumpian takeover of the GOP, Congresswoman Liz Cheney, has so far resisted joining the movement, since she fears splitting the party would hand greater power to the Democrats. But with her effective removal by Trump authoritarians from any position of power within the party, observers feel she could eventually rethink that position and perhaps even end up being an alternative conservative candidate for the presidency.    

This incipient rebellion within the GOP is, to my mind, the only real hope for the future of democracy in the United States. As noted historian John Meacham pointed out in the final days of the Trump administration, politics in America are no longer a matter of two parties debating issues from distinct viewpoints, but of two parties speaking two entirely different languages. And the language of the current GOP leadership is that of personality-cult authoritarianism, a language not so very different from that of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia Party.

True conservatives deserve to be represented by better minds and by genuinely patriotic hearts that put service above self-interest, Nation above party and democracy above personality. If the GOP has leaped permanently into the void of personality-cult autocracy and obstructionism aimed at destroying the opposition no matter what the cost to the Nation and to democracy, then the only hope for the future of democracy in the United States of America lies in the hands of conservatives who either rebel and take their party back from Trump and his cohorts, or in those with the courage to forge an entirely new conservative movement based on the original ethics of the party of Lincoln.

The current cold civil war between the two traditional parties is not a democratic option. The only thing it promises to ensure is that whoever “wins” will end up administrating the crumbling ruins of one of the greatest political systems ever devised.

 

TIME OUT

 

I’ve been taking a break. It wasn’t planned. It just happened. In fact, I hardly realized it was happening. I just suddenly awoke to the fact that it was about to be August, and when I looked up at the wall calendar over my desk, it was showing May.

“What the hell?” I thought. Did two months really get completely away from me? It was then too that I realized that I had written nothing for this blog in five months. I mean, it wasn’t as if I didn’t know I hadn’t written anything “in a while”. But five months!

I changed my calendar and promised myself to get it together, to return to my usually highly disciplined writing schedule, to shrug off apathy and start living again.

Then, all of the sudden one morning, I glanced at the date on my laptop, saw it was September, raised my eyes to look at the calendar on my wall, and saw that, there, it was still August. What the hell! Yet another month had drifted past. I was beginning to feel a little like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, but without the state of immortality or all of the quaint and interesting townspeople.

The fact is, however, that I haven’t just been “vegging out” for more than five months. I mean, I’ve been working. A lot. Until two months ago, I was still at least keeping up my literary blog, The Southern Yankee. But I had also gotten impossibly behind on a ghost-writing project.

I was contracted more than a year ago to ghost the autobiography of one of the lesser-known members of one of America’s traditional “royal families”. You would all know the name. Just about everyone in the Western world would. When I was first approached by the publisher for this private edition book and asked to provide a deadline, I said I figured three months give or take.

By the time we’re through, it will be more like a year and three months. It’s become impossibly unprofitable for me, even though I managed to talk the publisher into negotiating a fifty percent increase in my fee. The publisher can’t wait to be done with it either. And like me, they claim, they’re losing their shirt.

But at least they have the advantage of owning a book that, although it is likely to have a very limited audience, that audience is filled with people who might very well entrust them with their own life stories, especially because this promises to be a good book. Myself, I don’t have that advantage. When I’m done, I’ll breathe a sigh of relief that a difficult project is finished and pat myself on the back for a job well done. Or then again, maybe I’ll just think bitterly about how much time and energy I put into a book that isn’t mine in any real sense—thousands of hours of time and energy when time and energy are at a premium in this chapter of my own life—for a book that no one will ever know I wrote. Hence the term ghostwriter.  

There was a time not all that long ago when, once I’d given my word, I would have met that deadline even if it nearly killed me. And I would have met it by doing “the best I could” in the time allotted. But there’s something about reaching this stage in life (seventy plus, with a forty-seven-year writing career behind me) that makes you immune to a lot of the rules you once imposed on yourself—or let others impose on you. Priorities change when you are no longer “building a career for yourself”, when your reputation is already well established, and, furthermore, when you know that the time has come for your career, such as it is, to be whatever you want or don’t want to make of it.

It didn’t take long to figure out that I was way off on my estimate. Especially when I had written the first two chapters which contained a great deal about the world-famous family to which the subject belonged, only to have her reject them out of hand. This was her story, she said, not that of the family to which she had often wished she didn’t belong, because it was more of a burden than a benefit. 

So, there was a rather lengthy process of making her understand that while her life might be interesting in itself to a handful of friends and family members, what made it more interesting to a much broader audience was that she was a relatively unknown member of a very well-known family and that even though she might want to be her own person, it was impossible to separate how her life had been from the fact that she came from a very wealthy and very famous clan. The truth was, just about everything that had happened to her was inextricably connected to that fact. There was simply no denying the fact that being who she was born had a profound effect on her being who she had become.  

More specifically, what was perhaps most interesting of all was that the story was her personal history within the environment created by that family. Indeed, how she had coped with that—and how different her life had been from what an outsider was likely to imagine—was the main value of telling her story.

Renegotiating the storyline and the telling of it with her took several months. Then suddenly, one fine morning, she got out of bed on the other side, and it was all systems go. The pause, however, gave me time to think as well, and I decided that I was no longer okay with publishers imposing impossible deadlines on me or setting any but the most basic of rules for how a story would be told. I no longer wanted to feel like I was digging ditches instead of writing, obliged to write for money rather than getting paid for writing the very best way I knew how.

It was a kind of revelation. I discovered that I was no longer capable of writing any way but my best. Not the best that time or publishing constraints allowed, but as well and as authentically as I knew how. As a result, the narrative that I am now very close to finishing for the client—and in which I will have no acknowledgement whatsoever, since that is the fate of the ghost, a job that couldn’t be better named—is of far higher quality and authenticity than could ever be expected for a private edition, such as this will be..

What’s important about this isn’t that I’ve gone above and beyond for the client—which I have—but that I have been true to myself and my craft. I haven’t compromised on research, fact-checking or quality writing, and that achievement is of major importance to me as a writer. What it has meant is that an assignment that could have turned into a nightmare has instead made me feel accomplished—not like a hack to whom the importance of the money far outweighs the importance of the work.

But I can’t blame free-lance work entirely for being as remiss as I’ve been in fulfilling my commitment to my regular readers, or in at least letting them know earlier what was going on.

Regarding this point, I can only say that there were just entirely too many external factors eating at me to permit me to concentrate on more than one creative task at a time. In short, my normally robust multi-tasking mechanism was jammed by extenuating circumstances. My growing concern over these external factors seemed to cut me off at the knees, to partially cripple and disable my usually ample and eclectic creativity.

To start with, in the months since I wrote the last entry here, my sister-in-law passed away. It shouldn’t have been unexpected. She was eighty-two and had been seriously ill for three years—what doctors described as dementia accompanied by Parkinsonism. We, the family, had been supervising her care for that entire time. And we decided early on that we weren’t going to have her placed in “a facility” since she had been single and independent her entire life and had lived in the same century-old apartment on a busy avenue in Buenos Aires for the past three and a half decades. She would, we decided, end her life surrounded by the things she was familiar with.

Twenty-four/seven, she was in the capable hands of a male nurse, who was a friend of my brother-in-law’s, and his sister, who took turns seeing to her many, many needs. Thanks to their effectiveness and care, she didn’t spend a single day in the hospital and they became so attached to her that they considered her a sort of surrogate grandmother—and cared for her more and far better than the majority of young people would care for their real grandmother. Their loyalty to her was absolute.

On several occasions, the work and knowhow of the nurse pulled her out of downward spirals that should have ended her life. And the next day he would again have her sitting at the table for her meals and doing supervised exercises in her bedroom or in the patio, depending on the weather. We had long since understood that this wasn’t like some other terminal illnesses that have a more or less accurate prognosis. We simply were in it for the duration, as she would have been for any of us. So there came a time when we had almost forgotten, as one does, that death would be the ultimate factor.

So, it came as a sort of vaguely anticipated shock when the nurse called to say that, after having her breakfast like any other day, her blood pressure started dropping steadily. He got her on a drip and sought to bring her back the way he had before, but this time she simply went to sleep and slipped away. It was over and the feeling was one of utter emptiness.

Like a lot of other people, I had already become saturated, frustrated, jaded with the general climate in which we are all living—the seemingly endless pandemic and the great divide between science and politics that is perpetuating it; the juxtaposition of democracy and authoritarianism that is no longer the worldwide phenomenon that used to geopolitically divide East from West and North from South, but which now is threatening to end the once largely successful two and a half-century-old experiment in American political tradition, and the general sense of being utterly fed up with an atmosphere in which those who should be representing the people are obsessed with their own selfish political goals and no longer do anything for the good of their constituencies because they are too busy trying to put each other out of business.

Writing last March about the sexual improprieties of a governor I had long admired and whom I’d hoped would one day run for president had, on top of all the rest of this, been highly discouraging. And it seemed to mark a point of inflection in my years of political commentary. There was a feeling that no one could be trusted anymore to do the right thing. It seemed as if everyone had lowered their bar to the dismal standard of ethics set by Donald Trump—as if we’d reached a point of no return. It wasn’t that I made a conscious decision to quit writing this blog. It was just that I could no longer seem to work up the energy to write yet another essay about just how bad things had gotten.  

Never mind that I’ve spent an enormous amount of my career commenting on political and social realities and am bound at some point to keep doing the same because I can’t stop trying to analyze what often seems so utterly incomprehensible. For even an obsessively political person like myself, however, there are moments when you are simply fed up and can’t think about it anymore for a while without feeling nauseous. And the current moment in politics almost everywhere, but especially in my native United States, is a perfect one in which to feel nauseous.

But life goes on. And giving in to despair is not only an attitude of defeat, but also a monumental waste of time. So, I’m back, and with new impetus, and an unwillingness to compromise my vision of the past or of the future in the slightest, whether writing for my literary blog or for my political blog. Because my writing is who I am, and if I can’t be completely honest with myself and with you at this late stage in the game, when will I ever be?

 

WHAT ABOUT CUOMO?

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo

 In recent days, I have listened to and read about every stance imaginable regarding persistently increasing reports of gender-related impropriety by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. The mass media in general have been pretty ready to throw the governor under the bus, and calls for his resignation have been widespread. Even CNN, where Governor Cuomo’s brother Chris is one of the major anchors, has been highly critical and has gone out of its way—perhaps in the interest of perceived objectivity—to bring in critical outside commentators to discuss the issue. Meanwhile, the editorial board of the New York State capital’s top paper, the Hearst Corporation-owned Times-Union of Albany, which had three times backed Cuomo’s gubernatorial candidacy, last week ran an editorial entitled Resign, Mr. Cuomo. Additionally, there is a billboard campaign in New York City demanding that Cuomo “resign now.”

Nor is the media, in this case, in the position of challenging the governor’s party, since New York Democrats have pretty unanimously called on Cuomo to resign, as have US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, US congressional representative for New York Kristen Gillibrand, and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. It was only among some of my more liberal contacts on the social media and among some other friends and colleagues where I heard calls for leniency, in some cases because they felt Cuomo was too outstanding a leader for the party and the country to lose, and in others because of the “whataboutism” issue of the gutter-low bar set by former President Donald Trump who had apparently done far worse to women and been given (or paid for) a pass.

As often happens with sex scandals, this one comes saddled on the back of an actual administrative scandal—all but proven in a report from the New York State attorney general’s office—regarding a cover-up allegedly orchestrated by Cuomo’s administration to fudge the numbers on COVID-related deaths in state nursing homes by as much as fifty percent. The idea of this maneuver was to make it appear that the state government had the COVID situation in rest homes much more under control than it actually did, the excuse being that Cuomo feared Donald Trump’s team could use the real, devastatingly higher nursing home death toll against Democrats and indeed against the governor himself in the then upcoming 2020 elections. That was at a time when Cuomo was signing a deal for a book about his generally successful fight against the pandemic that had completely crippled New York City, and when there was even talk of his being an alternative to Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination in light of his burgeoning superstar hero status in the war on COVID.

But focus has been almost completely deflected away from the nursing home scandal to the more titillating topic of sexual impropriety, if indeed this can be called that, since what has been described by the alleged victims, though clearly inappropriate, sounds more like gender-related abuse of power and attendant peccadilloes than any sort of sexual assault, especially when compared to accusations regarding Donald Trump’s unpunished sexist exploits.

A half dozen accusers now lead the pack against Cuomo. The first to accuse him of sexual harassment was former aide Lindsey Boylan. In a piece that she posted on the social media platform Medium, Boylan claimed that the governor had created a culture of “sexual harassment and bullying” within his administration. She claimed that this culture was “so pervasive that it is not only condoned but expected.”

Ruch, Boylan and Bennett, the first three

In the article, Boylan talks about how she learned from colleagues that the governor had developed “a crush” on her, and tells about how her boss, Cuomo’s office director Stephanie Benton, told her in an email that Cuomo thought she and his rumored former girlfriend Lisa Shields looked so much alike that they “could be sisters” but that Boylan was “the better looking sister.” From then on, Boylan said, Cuomo began referring to her as “Lisa” in front of other colleagues and she began worrying about situations in which she might be left alone with the governor.

On one such occasion, Boylan claims Cuomo called her into his office alone to show her a cigar box that Bill Clinton had given him. She found it suggestive and understood that the governor was making a pointed reference to former Clinton intern Monica Lewinsky’s claim that during repeated Oval Office sexual encounters between her and the former president, Clinton had used a cigar on her as a sex toy. Boylan also claims that at another point, Cuomo kissed her without her consent.

A second accuser, Charlotte Bennett, says that Cuomo asked her probing questions about her sex life, asked her if she had ever been “with an older man” and told her he had no problem dating women over twenty-two—Bennett was twenty-five at the time. “I understood that the governor wanted to sleep with me,” Bennett claims, “and was wondering how I was going to get out of it.”

Another accuser, Anna Ruch, didn’t work for the governor but is a former member of the Obama administration and worked on Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. She claims that on her first meeting with Cuomo at a wedding reception in New York City, he took her face in his hands and asked if he could kiss her. She says she found his behavior so inappropriate that she was “confused and shocked and embarrassed.” Ruch says that she was so taken by surprise that she couldn’t find words to respond and simply “turned my head away.”

Still another woman, Karen Hinton, claims Cuomo was already doing this sort of thing over twenty years ago, when he was Housing and Urban Development secretary under Bill Clinton. At the time, Hinton was one of Cuomo’s top aides. She says that when they were working together in a California hotel room, Cuomo started asking her a lot of personal questions. “I was uncomfortable with the conversation,” Hinton said in a TV interview. “So I stood up to leave and he walked across from his couch and embraced me intimately. It was not just a hug. It was an intimate embrace. I pulled away. He brought me back. I pulled away again and I said, 'Look, I need some sleep, I am going.'” Hinton went on to say that, to her mind, “It was inappropriate. We both were married. I worked for him and it was too much to make it so personal and intimate.”

Another former aide, Ana Liss, says that she was made to feel like “just a skirt” in the Governor's presence. Telling her story to the Wall Street Journal, Liss says Cuomo consistently addressed her as “sweetheart”, asked if she had a boyfriend, touched her “lower back” and on one occasion took her hand and kissed it. She says she at first tried to write it off as “harmless flirtations” but that the situation grew ever more uncomfortable. So much so that it was “not appropriate, really, in any setting.”

In its editorial, the Albany Times-Union news management team said that it “had not taken lightly” its decision to withdraw support from the governor, adding that, “He has brought to fruition a host of important progressive goals. But between his manipulation of state ethics bodies, multiple allegations of sexual harassment and these latest revelations on nursing home deaths, he has lost the credibility he needs to lead this state, especially in the midst of a public health crisis.”

If we’re keeping our priorities straight, clearly the main issue here is to what extent Governor Cuomo and his team, for a question of political convenience, sought to manipulate COVID death toll figures in an attempt to keep the real gravity of state nursing home fatalities a secret from the public. Although his actions may not have directly caused any additional deaths, they did indeed skew the level of awareness regarding the effects of the pandemic. Worse still, the inevitable revelation of the attempted cover-up only served to further undermine already abysmal levels of public trust in government data regarding the worst health crisis in a century, at a time when people’s adherence to federal guidelines for bringing this plague under control couldn’t be more crucial.

The hypocrisy of all this is not lost on even mildly objective observers, since Democrats in general and Cuomo in particular have been critical of the GOP under Trump for downplaying the pandemic and for denying the gravity of the rising death toll. Cuomo’s doing the same with the New York State nursing home deaths has immediately permitted Trump supporters to weaponize the revelation. After the many years that he has spent in politics and coming as he does from a bloodline of politicians, the governor should have known that something this big could not be kept secret. Considering that, at the very least, he should have made sure that his otherwise spectacular handling of the pandemic was absolutely transparent from the outset.

Ana Liss and Karen Hinton add voices to the mix

Which brings us back to the other scandal, since what has apparently been in play in both cases is arrogance—that most authoritarian of emotions. The greatest downfall of the powerful is to believe their own hype. There is something chillingly similar, if clearly less crass, about Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood tape and the kind of behavior Cuomo’s accusers are attributing to him. Trump revealed in that now infamous tape that he truly believed that being a star gave him the right to do whatever he wanted with other people, and more particularly, with young women, even to the extent of reaching out and touching whatever part of them he wished whenever he wanted to.

Cuomo has reportedly been somewhat less obvious about this. But if what an increasing number of his female staffers are alleging is true, that idea of his rock star status is at the back of his mind. In his alleged sexual harassment of—or at least inappropriate behavior toward—young women subordinates like Lindsey Boylan, Charlotte Bennett or Ana Liss, there seems to be a tacit inference on his part that either any attractive female thirty or forty years his junior should be thrilled to receive the advances of a guy like him because he isn’t just any senior citizen, but a star politician with a whole other aura, or he is so arrogantly authoritarian that he really doesn’t care what these women think because he holds the future of their careers in his hands. In either case, the premise is sexist, elitist and contemptible, because it doesn’t, for a second, take the other person’s rights or desires or personal lives into account.

Cuomo for his part has made a half-hearted and qualified apology in which his quavering voice and damp eyes seemed to indicate sincerity. But his subsequent comments on the affair have tended to dismiss the allegations of his accusers as a misunderstanding and an exaggeration of the facts. Using the excuse, for instance—as Cuomo did about Charlotte Bennett—that her perception of his overly intimate treatment of her as sexual harassment was off base because he considered himself her “mentor” is disingenuous to say the least. It begs the question of whether a young woman in the employ of “a great man” must accept as a normal part of the “mentoring process” being subjected to probing personal questions and sexual innuendo from a male superior old enough to be her grandfather—or from any boss for that matter.

Sadly enough, however, in both the public and private sectors, this is far too often the case. And this is why the MeToo movement was formed, as a means of bringing cases of on-the-job sexual harassment and, indeed, of sexual assault to the forefront and to seek punishment for its perpetrators. The governor is no stranger to this phenomenon and was one of the first of powerful men to come out publicly in support of it. Meanwhile, however, on a personal level, Cuomo can’t seem to shake the antiquated culture of objectifying and sexually exploiting women in the workplace that has sadly been part and parcel of the era in which he was forming his impressive political career.

There is no doubt that Governor Cuomo’s political enemies in the Republican Party and indeed his rivals in the Democratic Party (such as Mayor de Blasio) are milking his current woes for every political point they can possibly gain. But there are a couple of questions that those who have angrily charged that Cuomo “is being framed”—and I confess to being one of them before I gave the matter a lot deeper thought—should be asking themselves.

The first one is this: Why, no matter how hard they tried—and you just know they did—to dig up personal dirt on former presidents Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama were their political enemies unable to do so? Answer: Because there was no “there-there”. They kept the slate clean in their private lives, and they certainly didn’t seek to intimately fraternize with or sexually exploit their female staff members, but rather, treated them with utmost respect. Bill Clinton, meanwhile, no matter how great his achievements or how beneficial to the country his presidency may have been, will always be remembered at a grassroots level as the perv-president who repeatedly had sex in the Oval Office with an intern half his age.

Cuomo, proud father of three daughters...

And the second one is this: When is “harmless flirtation” or “playful banter”, not merely harmless flirtation or playful banter? Answer: When the person initiating it is someone too powerful to challenge without the threat of damage to one’s career advancement. Worse still, when such “banter” and “flirtation” belies a perceived sexual proposition that makes the target have to ask herself: Is my career really worth challenging this and carrying it to its ultimate consequences (and maybe getting blackballed in the process) or, failing that, is it worth sleeping with the boss in hopes that he will do me no harm in the future?

No subordinate should have to ask herself (or, far less often, himself) that question. And if one does have to pose it, then there is clearly sexual impropriety in the workplace.

Finally, I have a rhetorical question for Governor Cuomo himself. He has three lovely daughters with his former wife, Kerry Kennedy, daughter of the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy. By all accounts, Cuomo and his wife did an excellent job of bringing their three girls up and all three appear talented, intelligent and well-educated. The kind of young women that could very well end up working for a powerful man like the governor himself. If that should happen, how will Cuomo feel if he learns that one or all three of them have been made to feel that their careers are in jeopardy if they don’t sleep with the boss? Perhaps he should think that over and re-think his apology.