Grounds for Impeachment

Contemplating the forthcoming impeachment of President Trump--an event every day's headlines make more likely, at a pace even more rapid than that of 1973-4--I began thinking harder about possible grounds.  That took me to a book that I had originally brought and read back in those days, Impeachment: The Constitutional Problems, by the remarkable law professor Raoul Berger.  Having worked as a Washington lawyer for many years before becoming a Professor at Berkeley in 1960, when he was 60, Berger, I see, was a fellow in legal history at Harvard's Charles Warren Center when he wrote Impeachment--and he was also exactly the age that I am now.  It's a wonderful piece of legal-historical scholarship, packed into 300 relatively short pages with a lot of footnotes at the bottom.  And it leaves me believing that the Congress has ever reason to impeach and convict President Trump, albeit on grounds that are not playing much of a role in the public discussion of his case so far.

Like every great legal scholar, Berger understood that American law--including Constitutional law--has to be understood against the background of British precedents.  The Constitution uses many words whose meaning had been defined by English law, the English common law was still part of the law of the colonies, and in many respects the framers aimed at keeping the good parts of the British Constitution while correcting the problems that had led to the Revolution.  "Impeachment" and "high crimes and misdemeanors" were both terms familiar in British practice, and both had very specific meanings which the framers were incorporating into our own Constitution.  Berger therefore began with a brief history of the development of impeachments in medieval England, going back to the 14th century.  Even then, the outlines of our current procedures emerged: the House of Commons, the lower house of Parliament, could vote impeachments, which the House of Lords then tried--and the monarch, although long thought immune from any judicial punishment, could not protect his ministers from impeachment, trial and conviction.   During the reign of Charles I, who tried to govern without Parliament and create an absolute monarchy, Parliament successfully impeached, tried, convicted, and executed, his first minister, the Earl of Strafford, on the specific grounds that he was subverting the unwritten English constitution by attempting to govern without parliament.  Indeed, his parliamentary accusers defined that behavior as a form of treason, and Strafford was executed. (See note at the end.) Several subsequent 17th-century impeachments of great ministers also claimed that they had committed various forms of treason, defined as subversion of the Constitution (although their punishments fell short of death.)  A much earlier statute had actually given Parliament the right to define treason--obviously a formidable weapon against an unpopular minister, especially in contentious times.

The framers of the Constitution, wise and well-read men that they were, took several explicit steps to prevent the abuse of the impeachment power, such as surely had taken place in Britain.  They defined treason very specifically as levying war upon the United States or giving its enemies (presumably, wartime enemies) aid and comfort.  They explicitly limited punishments in cases of impeachment to removal from office and disqualification from further office, although they added that those impeached and convicted could be subject to additional trials and penalties in ordinary courts.  They forbade pardons in cases of impeachment, such as at least one monarch had given to an accused subordinate in Britain.  They also outlawed Bills of Attainder, laws passed by Parliament (with the King's assent) that could order the execution of a guilty subject, as well as the forfeiture of all his property and titles.  Yet in their own way, they laid out broad grounds for impeachment of civil officers of the United States, including the President, for "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors."  To these we now turn.

As I have noted, treason has a very specific definition under the Constitution, and bribery has such a definition under the regular law.  The first thing that we may say about "high crimes and misdemeanors" is that they are not ordinary crimes, and the House and Senate have convicted and removed judges for offenses that are not punishable by statute law.  In 1936, a certain Judge Halsted Ritter was convicted not of income tax evasion, of which he had been charged, but of "[bringing] his court into scandal and disrepute, to the prejudice of said court  and public confidence in the administration of justice [emphasis added]."  His conduct made him "guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors in office," the Senate stated.  Two Chief Justices of the Supreme Court, William Howard Taft and Charles Evans Hughes, stated publicly that impeachments could be brought for any reason showing unfitness or misconduct in office, even if specific crimes were not involved--such behavior fell within "high crimes and misdemeanors."  That phrase also dates from 14th-century England many English precedents defined it quite clearly, and in ways most relevant to our current dilemma.  "Your lordships," a lord said in the midst of impeachment debate in 1725. "are now exercising a power of judicature reserved in the original frame of the English constitution for offenses of a public nature, which  may affect the nation; as well in cases where inferior courts have no power to punish the crimes committed by ordinary rules of justice. [emphasis added]"  In 1757 the great commentator Blackstone described "the first and principal" high misdemanor as "the mal-administration of such high officers, who are in the public trust or employment;" for this impeachment was the remedy. Another commentator expanded on this point with specific examples that, once again, show how frequently critical issues in politics and government tend to recur. "If the judges mislead their sovereign by unconstitutional opinions. . . .where the lord chancellor has been thought to put the seal to an ignominious treaty. . . .a privy councillor to propound or support dishonorable measures, or a confidential adviser of the sovereign to obtain exhorbitant grants. . .these imputations have properly occasioned impeachments, because it is apparent how little ordinary tribunals are calculated to take cognizance of such offenses, or to investigate and reform the general policy of the state[emphasis added].  On pp. 67-9 of Impeachment Berger prints a long list of impeachable offenses relating to the failure properly to perform the duties of a particular office, be it judicial, military, or civil.   The framers, however, also agreed, as Berger shows, that impeachments of Presidents had to be confined to "great offenses" which, although not necessarily indictable under the law, amounted to much more than a neglect of relatively trivial duties.

Berger fortuitously finished and published Impeachment just as the Watergate scandal was breaking.  Clearly the offenses of Richard Nixon and his men--including the break-in into the Watergate, the burglary of a doctor's office to secure damaging information about the leaker Daniel Ellsberg, the attempted use of the CIA to try to block the investigation of the Watergate burglary, and the payment of hush money to keep witnesses quiet--qualified as "high crimes and misdemeanors" as the framers understood them.  Equally clearly, the impeachment of Bill Clinton had no basis in constitutional law as understood by the framers, since his alleged offenses had nothing to do with the performance of his official duties.

What about Donald Trump?

Both before and after assuming office, the President has welcomed the interference of a foreign power in our elections.  He asked the Russians to try to find Hillary Clinton's emails during the campaign, and we have now learned that he told two Russian diplomats in the spring of 2017 that he did not mind what they had done.  Now, he has enlisted both his private attorney Rudy Giuliani and his State and Justice Departments in an attempt to persuade the government of Ukraine to develop negative information about candidate Biden and his son, and he probably blocked military aid to Ukraine to try to get his way.  In short, after having (with some difficulty) found cabinet officers who will consistently do his bidding at State and Justice, he has used them to try to use the power of the federal government to re-elect himself by discrediting a political opponent.

Meanwhile, the President has repeatedly shown contempt for the law of the land, and a willingness to obstruct it.  He wanted to fire Robert Mueller during his investigation and repeatedly ordered subordinates to do so.  He has also told Border Patrol officials to take potentially illegal steps to stop migrants from coming over our southern border, and promised to pardon them for doing so if they get into legal trouble as a result.  He has defied numerous subpoenas from Congress.

More importantly, in my opinion, the President has shown over the nearly three years of his administration that he cannot run the federal government effectively.  He has fired cabinet officers and other officials at an unprecedented rate because he cannot bear subordinates who have integrity and independence of mind.  Large numbers of important government positions still remain unfilled.  His administration has blocked various agencies from releasing scientific findings.  He has shown appalling judgment of foreign leaders such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un.  His phone conversations with various foreign leaders, we now learned, have seriously disturbed subordinates who heard them or saw the transcripts. The Congress in my opinion has every right to see the transcripts of his conversations with those men to see what they reveal about his fitness for office.

Law Professor John Yoo, who wrote the notorious torture memo for the Bush Administration when he worked in the Office of Legal Counsel, has argued that Trump should not be impeached based upon a conversation with the President of Ukraine because presidents need to have confidential conversations with foreign leaders. That, I think, completely misunderstands the founders' position on impeachment.  The broader issue involved here is this:  should a President be punished for the use he makes of a normal part of the duties of his office?  In my opinion, the founders and the English statesmen whose precedents they respected obviously answered that question in the affirmative.  Indeed, a President who used purely legal means to undermine national security, spread false stories about political opponents, and run a revolving door government in an attempt to find sycophants that would do his bidding would be more dangerous that one who obviously violated the law.  Such a man is exactly the kind of president with which the impeachment clause of the Constitution was designed to deal.

All of this would be quite obvious, it seems to me, in a nation that still took the history and procedures of its government seriously and appreciated what the federal government does for the nation. Unfortunately, the election of 2016 proved that that is no longer the nation that we are.  Partisanship, not a respect for established principles, now drives our politics.  Indeed, large parts of the Republican Party have resented the growth of the federal government and wished that much of it would disappear for 80 years.  Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and George W. Bush all shared, to a certain degree, Trump's hostility towards our permanent government and its purposes.  Thus we cannot be sure that if a House Democratic majority votes articles of impeachment, that the Senate will muster even a majority--much less the necessary 2/3--to convict.

And thus, while I feel that impeachment and conviction are more than warranted, I still am not sure that voting those articles will leave us better off than we are now.  Still, the die is cast.  More and more revelations are coming out, and a few Republicans are expressing doubts about Donald Trump.  When parties march in lock step, they can change direction with extraordinary speed.  Anything is possible.  Meanwhile, my thanks go again to Raoul Berger, who,. nearly 50 years after the publication of his book, has shown me that the situation we face is indeed exactly the kind of situation that the founders put impeachment into the Constitution to deal with.

Note: In the end the Earl of Strafford's impeachment did not result in a conviction.  Before the House of Lords could finish trying the case, King Charles' opponents in the Commons decided instead to pass a bill of attainder calling for his execution.  The Lords also passed it and the King assented to try to mollify Parliament and stop a revolution.  In that he failed.  Exactly why the leaders of the Commons changed their minds about procedure is not clear, as Berger shows, but it certainly was not because they lacked the power to impeach and convict the Earl for violations of Britain's unwritten constitution.

Impeachment Prospects

Let me begin with a flat statement: impeachment--in its literal sense--is going ahead.  Impeachment refers to a kind of indictment brought in our system by the House of Representatives, and it does not in itself remove the President or other impeached officials. Conviction or acquittal is the prerogative of the Senate, which must remove the impeached official by a 2/3 vote.  That the Senate failed to do in the cases of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton.  The House was ready to impeach and the Senate was ready to convict Richard Nixon, but he resigned before they could do so.

Trump has now been caught red-handed in a serious offense, and the momentum within the Democratic House caucus, which had already been building, has really taken off now. I shared Nancy Pelosi's skepticism about the wisdom of the step and I am not convinced even now that it will turn out well--but it looks like it is going to happen and I am not going to make the mistake, so common in this day and age, of assuming that what I want must always happen sooner or later.  In any case I am not really against impeachment now--just concerned about where it will lead.

As usual, the media have frequently been misstating a lot of the facts and issues in the case.  The whistle blower complaint and the transcript that has been released make it clear to me that Trump has committed a very impeachable offense.  I'm not referring to a quid pro quo exactly, or to a possible violation of campaign laws (which depends on a very broad interpretation of those laws, just as it does in the Stormy Daniels case.)  Trump was attempting to create an active conspiracy between a foreign government, his personal attorney, and the Attorney General and the Justice Department, designed to develop incriminating information against the leading presidential candidate of the other party.  That subverts our political process and, more importantly in my view, the functioning of the criminal justice system.  The President sees the government--or those parts of it about which he cares--as his personal staff, there to further his interests.  Even Jeff Sessions, who I thought was about as conservative a Republican as one could find, was not willing to play his assigned role. Neither was White House Counsel Don McGann. William Barr, however, is fully on board (and may deserve to be impeached himself as well, depending on how much active collaboration he has done with Giuliani on this and other matters.)

For at least the second time, the President is treating a foreign government as an ally in a struggle with a domestic political opponent.  Despite the strict legal conclusions of the Mueller report, we know that the Russian government provided extensive help to the Trump campaign in 2016 by hacking and releasing DNC emails and mounting campaigns on social media.  Trump publicly asked them for more assistance in the midst of the campaign, and at least one associate of his campaign, Roger Stone, seems to have been in touch with Wikileaks regarding the publication of the emails. Yesterday we learned that Trump told two Russian diplomats in the spring of 2017 that he didn't object to what their government had done during our election.  Since foreign assistance had got him into the White House, he seems to feel, there is no reason why it should not keep him there.

Whether or not any of this involves indictable crimes that would result in a conviction in court, these steps in my view fall very much within the category of offenses with which the Founders expected impeachment to deal.  "Mr. MADISON," the record of the debates of the Constitutional convention reads, "thought it indispensable that some provision should be made for defending the Community agst. [sic] the incapacity, negligence or perfidy of the chief Magistrate." Trump has demonstrated all three, repeatedly, and this case is a spectacular one.

Other very recent revelations confirm his incapacity and perfidy.  Rather than directing the operations of the federal government, he is carrying on much of his presidency in secret.  Responsible authorities, we now find, cannot see what he has said to the leaders of Russia and Saudi Arabia in phone conversations--they too are kept in a special, almost private server.  Yesterday the New York Times reported that Trump discussed trading gun legislation for support over impeachment with the NRA.  Our President is a diplomatic incompetent who cannot distinguish the national interest from his own.  For that he deserves to be removed.

But will he be?

I have written many times that the election of Donald Trump, an obvious huckster who has had to declare bankruptcy more than once, who has lied about many things for the whole of his career, and who made the fantastic claim that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, showed that our political system had collapsed.  Neither the Republican nor the Democratic Party could produce a candidate who could beat him.  A large segment of the population--a segment not limited to Trump voters--had lost all confidence in our political class.  During the last three years the collapse has gotten worse on the Republican side at least, as the Republican Party has shamelessly lined up behind Trump, fearing the power of his alliance with Fox News, and welcoming many of his policy initiatives.  Meanwhile, the Democratic news media has indeed waged a continuous partisan campaign focused upon him, rather than telling us more about what is actually happening in the US.  The impeachment story will now take over the news for as long as it goes on, just as the Russian story did.  A long partisan controversy over impeachment, I fear, will not improve the nation's opinion of its political leadership, especially if his acquittal by the Senate remains a foregone conclusion.

That is not all.  To be offended by the subversion of our constitutional order, the public needs to understand and revere it.  It no longer does.  The Constitution--or at least, the 20th century interpretation of it--has been under attack for decades by the Right, who want to cripple the federal power to regulate the economy (something which, by the way, was well established at the time the Constitution was adopted.)  Increasingly university students learn nothing about the Constitution except that it did not specifically enshrine equal rights for female and black inhabitants of the country.  The reverence for the Constitution that Lincoln used to fight and win the civil war, that civil rights leaders exploited in the middle of the twentieth century, and that Sam Ervin and others used to bring down Nixon, is almost absent from our public discussions today.  It will not bring the necessary Senate Republicans over to the side of conviction.

On the other hand, the whistle controversy has set off a cascade of revelations, and sources claim that a good many Congressional Republicans are disturbed. Perhaps more of them will persuade many of them that Trump has to go; perhaps, as has already happened with the NRA, a desperate Trump will turn out to be his own worst enemy.  In that case, yes, it is possible that Mike Pence will become President.  The Democratic nominee will then have to wage a campaign against Trumpism without Trump.  We have no idea how that will go--although Pence has never looked like an impressive national figure to me.

In the worst case, Trump will be acquitted (or conceivably not impeached at all), the Democratic nomination struggle will be divisive, and he will win a second term.  A voters' convincing rejection of him after an acquittal would for me be the best scenario of all, since it would reaffirm popular sovereignty and a necessary minimum of popular wisdom.  That would however be only the beginning of a long process of trying to restore effective democracy.  It would merely confirm, thankfully, that we had hit bottom at last.

You heard it here first

CNN is being a bit slow identifying the key part of the phone call. Trump did not just ask Zelensky for a favor.  He asked him specifically to talk to Giuliani AND ATTORNEY GENERAL BARR about further investigation of Biden. In other words, he is caught red-handed doing exactly what he was accused of doing with Russia in 2016, except that this time, he's trying to use the Justice Department to help him, not just his campaign.  So far no one has asked Barr about this either.

Trump's real analog

The political figure from American history whom Donald Trump most resembles, it seems to me, is Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who for a little more than four years--from February 1950 until the middle of 1954--terrorized Washington and much of the country with accusations of Communist conspiracies in the State Department, in other parts of the Truman Administration, and inside the Democratic Party.  The chief counsel of McCarthy's Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee, Roy Cohn, later became associated with Trump in the 1970s and 1980s, and Trump credits him with a good deal of influence upon him.  I thought of all this as I read the stories about Trump's apparent conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and read the transcript of Rudi Giuliani's interview with Chris Cuomo.   Trump  employs essentially the same tactics as McCarthy, and seems to me to be, in important ways, the same kind of person.  That he has risen much further, alas, shows how much American political life has deteriorated over the last 70 years or so.

McCarthy burst upon the scene in February 1950, at a Lincoln Day Republican dinner in Wheeling, West Virginia, when he claimed to have evidence that more than 200 card carrying Communists were working at the State Department.  He had been elected four years earlier during a Republican sweep, thanks in part to complicated maneuverings within Massachusetts politics that even led to his receiving the support of the small Communist party.  The state was then very liberal and he needed an issue for his impending re-election. Communism became it.

Trump. of course, burst onto the national political scene in the summer of 2015 with his sensational claims about illegal immigrants, but his real similarity to McCarthy emerged when he had to respond to allegations that his campaign had worked with Russian intelligence during 2016.  Having "discovered" more than 200 non-existent Communists in the State Department, McCarthy treated all the opposition to him as evidence of how vast the Communist conspiracy was.  When he was challenged--for instance, by Senator Milward Tydings of Maryland, whose Foreign Relations subcommittee found his charges baseless later in 1950--he argued that his challengers were working for the Communists themselves--and he managed to secure Tydings's defeat, in his bid for a fifth Senate term, in November 1950, when Republicans made big gains again.  After that the Republican Party adopted McCarthy in much the same way that it has now adopted Trump.  With very rare exceptions, such as Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, Republicans decided that he was too big an asset to discard, and too much of a threat to oppose.   In 1952, when General Dwight Eisenhower won the Republican nomination, Ike planned during a campaign swing through Wisconsin to refer favorably to his old boss, General George Marshall, whom McCarthy had accused of treasonously handing China over to the Communists on the floor of the Senate.  His political handlers talked him into deleting it.  Richard Nixon, who had begun beating the Communist treachery drum well before McCarthy, regarded him as an important ally.

The election of Eisenhower deprived McCarthy of a Democratic target at the White House, and the Republican assumption of the control of the Senate gave him a powerful committee chairmanship.  Pushed by Cohn, McCarthy continued looking for Communists within the government even though it was now in his own party's hands.  Looking for Communists within the U.S. Army, he stumbled upon an Army dentist named Irving Peress, who had been discharged after he refused to answer routine questions about membership in organizations deemed subversive.  While this action against him was pending, however, he had been routinely promoted from captain to major, and "Who promoted Peress?" became McCarthy's rallying cry.  In the meantime, another committee staffer, David Schine--who had gone on investigative trips with the gay Roy Cohn--was drafted into the US Army.  McCarthy's office, it turned out, had tried to intercede with his commanders on numerous occasions to get him special treatment.  That led to another set of Senate hearings that eventually led to McCarthy's downfall.

Trump's response to the whistle blower's accusations about his phone conversation with President Zelensky last month, in which he apparently demanded that Zelensky pursue an investigation of Joe Biden's son Hunter, who had worked with a Ukrainian bank, comes right from McCarthy's playbook.  Circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that Trump had withheld military aid from Ukraine for several months this summer to pressure Zelensky to go after Hunter Biden.  Before the content of the phone call leaked, however, Rudy Giuliani, playing the role of Roy Cohn, went on television to accuse Biden, essentially, of doing what Trump had done: of threatening to withhold aid from Ukraine if a previous president did not fire a particular prosecutor who, Giuliani claims without evidence, was investigating his son.  This was (and still is) of course the Trump team's tactic towards the Russia investigation as well: to insist that it was Hillary Clinton, not Trump and his minions, who colluded with the Russians to win the election. Both Trump and McCarthy seem to believe that attack is not simply the best defense, it's the only defense.

Going a layer deeper, I would suggest that the things McCarthy and Trump have done suggest another similarity: a total lack of commitment to, or respect for, anything but their own narcissistic self-image as superheroes fighting a hostile world.  McCarthy didn't care about the enormous damage he did to the State Department, the Army, and America's image abroad, provided that it got him more ink.   Trump in the same way has no respect for fundamental laws and principles of American government as he wages his endless struggle against his enemies.  That is why he was willing to try to conspire with a foreign government to try to destroy a political opponent, validating the charge that he had to fight with respect to Russia for two years.  Since Zelensky might help him, it was Zelensky's duty to do so.  Turning to him parallels what Trump did in the 1990s, when he turned to Deutsche Bank, a foreign entity, for credit, because American banks, burned by his successive bankruptcies, wouldn't lend to him any longer.  He sees himself, not simply as an American, but as Donald Trump, international superstar, the equal of men like Putin, Zi, and Kim Jong Un.  They can give him the stature that the reality based community here in the US denies him.

Sadly, Trump disposes of considerably more resources than McCarthy did in his own struggle for survival.  McCarthy had allies in the press and on the radio, but they did not compare in their reach to Fox News, Trump's own private ministry of propaganda.  While McCarthy had considerable influence within the Republican Party, he could not compete with a Republican President who had returned the GOP to power in a landslide, and who had more to offer his fellow Senators than he did.  Trump has essentially no Republican opposition.  Many Senate Republicans cut McCarthy loose and destroyed him in a censure vote in 1954 because they found it politically wise to do so.  It seems inconceivable to me that that will happen to Trump before the 2020 election.

Only the American voter, it seems, can drive Trump out of office.  Here the McCarthy parallel offers some hope.  Even at his peak, he was never nearly as popular in Wisconsin as many assumed.  When he stood for re-election in 1952 he defeated an almost unknown opponent by a plurality of 113,000 votes, while Eisenhower carried the state over Stevenson by 358,000 votes.  This week, every general election trial heat poll--including Fox News's--shows Trump trailing all three of the leading Democratic candidates.  Trump's election in 2016, however close it may have been, proved that the American political system had ceased to function for the public good.  The signs are that the public will be willing to take a first step in restoring it, by voting  him out of office.

The Government and Private Interests, 1962 and 2019

Last Saturday’s New York Times reported that the Justice Department has warned four leading car companies—Ford, Volkswagen of America, Honda and BMW--that it may pursue an antitrust case against them for sticking to a deal with the of California that would commit them to meeting mileage targets for their cars—and corresponding targets for carbon emissions—that are much stricter than the loose ones that the Trump Administration has just announced.  I immediately remembered another case, more than 57 years ago, in which the Justice Department threatened leading firms in a major American industry with antitrust action and helped change its behavior to meet a policy goal of the Kennedy Administration.  The comparison is a terrifying illustration of what has gone wrong in American life and American government since the early 1960s.

Some background is in order.  The 1940s, 1950s and 1960s saw remarkable economic growth in the United States, dominated by major industries such as automobiles, energy, and steel.  Meanwhile, they also saw a remarkable growth in the reach and power of the American labor movement, which had successfully organized coal miners, autoworkers, steelworkers, and just about every other major industry.  The unions made pretty steady wage gains for their workers, and their employers passed some of those gains on to consumers.  Inflation had become an intermittent problem during the 1950s, reaching about 3% annually in the middle of the decade, but falling in 1958-9 because of a recession.  Another recession struck in 1960-1, and the new Kennedy Administration, which included a number of prominent economists, wanted to encourage recovery without triggering a new round of price increases.  To do so, the administration, led by its Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg—himself a labor lawyer—tried to intervene in major contract negotiations.

The American steel industry in 1962 was easily the world’s largest, and changes in its wages and prices always had immediate effects throughout the economy.  Its union contract was expiring in the spring of 1962.  In meetings that included both union leaders and Roger Blough of US Steel, Goldberg and the President made clear that they wanted a new contract that would not lead to a steel price increase.  Blough said nothing in response.  Then, when the parties had reached a settlement, Blough immediately announced that US Steel was raising its prices—a signal to the rest of the industry to do the same.   The President reacted immediately, opening a press conference by declaring that the price increase constituted “a wholly unjustifiable and irresponsible defiance of the public interest.” When the nation was asking the military, union members, and all its citizens for sacrifice, he said, “ the American people will find it hard, as I do, to accept a situation in which a tiny handful of steel executives whose pursuit of private power and profit exceeds their sense of public responsibility can show such utter contempt for the interests of 185 million Americans.” (Readers who follow this link and read Kennedy’s entire statement will find a rather extraordinary contrast with a day or two of our current President’s tweets.)  The President led a government-wide effort to force Blough to back down, including the opening of an FBI investigation into price fixing in violation of the antitrust laws, and a shift of Defense Department steel purchases to companies that did not go along with the increase.  Within a few days, Blough rescinded the increase.  Kennedy had scored a remarkable victory for his Presidency—followed within the next six months by the successful attempt to secure the admission of the first black American to the University of Mississippi, and then, his remarkable resolution of the Cuban missile crisis.  During 1963 he followed those up with the introduction of the great civil rights bill that would end discrimination in public accommodations and the negotiation of the Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union.  No subsequent president has shown such a consistent ability to deploy the power of his office for the public good.

The Trump Administration’s decision to threaten the auto manufacturers with anti-trust action if they continue to observe their agreement with the state of California has an opposite purpose.  Kennedy successfully forced the steel companies to subordinate their private interests to the public interest.  Trump and Attorney General Barr want to help private interests—specifically, energy companies—at the expense of the public interest and the very future of human life on our planet.  Because of its vulnerability to pollution, the state of California has the right to set its own emissions standards, and because of the size of the market it represents, the car companies have an interest in observing those standards.  13 other states also follow California’s rules. Reducing the fuel consumption of our automobiles—now the single largest source of carbon pollution in the United States—is of course critical to any attempt to halt climate change.  The Trump Administration, however, remains in denial about climate change, and does not seem to want to lessen reliance on fossil fuels.  Its Justice Department is now accusing the auto manufacturers of conspiring to build more expensive cars, in an attempt to force them to abandon the California standards.  No one but Koch industries and other fossil fuel producers will benefit if the administration succeeds.

From the 1930s through the early 1960s, a sense of the public interest dominated the political life of the United States.  That enabled us to fight the Depression, prepare for and win the Second World War, and rebuild Europe. We expanded the nation’s housing stock and its school systems, undertook the interstate highway system, and mounted the civil rights movement.  Now nearly every politically active element in our society makes its demands on behalf of a particular economic interest or demographic group, not for the good of the nation of the whole.  That may be the biggest single reason for the catastrophic state of our political life.