Bismarck in the White House?

 The Kingdom of Prussia in 1862 was experiencing a constitutional crisis.  After centuries of bureaucratic absolutism, the kingdom in 1848 had survived a revolution and the King had granted a constitution giving the Parliament or Landtag the power of the purse.  Now the government had proposed a reorganization of the military to downplay the role of reserve troops, who included many politicians, and increase the term of service for conscripts.  A majority in parliament refused to pass an annual budget until the government yielded on the army issue.  

The Prussian King William, a conservative, appointed the noble diplomat Otto von Bismarck, who had no national political experience, as Prime Minister.  Claiming that the constitution could not possibly be interpreted to prevent the government from functioning, Bismarck said that if the Landtag refused to pass a new budget, he would continue taxing and spending based upon the budget from the previous year.  He exerted pressure on the civil service, which included a good many supporters of parliament, to conform to his views, making political loyalty a requirement for promotion.  He began subsidizing friendly newspapers and had the king sign an edict allowing the government to shut down opposition newspapers.  In the next year he called new elections, only to see the parliamentary opposition return a greater majority.  An aggressive foreign policy gave Bismarck a way out of his domestic impasse.  In 1864 Prussia and Austria fought a successful war against Denmark, and in 1866 Prussia defeated Austria and Bismarck created a new North German Confederation dominated by Prussia.  Then, for the first time, the Prussian Landtag retroactively legitimated his four years of government without an agreed budget.

The United States, I believe, is about to go through something similar.  Article I, section 8 of our constitutions gives the Congress the power "to borrow money on the credit of the United States,"  and this month the debt ceiling has to be increased to keep the government running.  Minority leader Chuck Schumer, under heavy pressure from some of his fellow Senators and from the House, has decided to take advantage of the filibuster rule to refuse to increase it unless the Republicans agree to undo provisions of the "big, beautiful bill" relating to health care, in particular.  These include the repeal of new Medicaid eligibility restrictions and forthcoming reductions of subsidies for insurance under Obamacare, which may deprive millions of Americans of health insurance.  

The chances of the Administration and its congressional allies giving in to these demands, in my opinion, are the same as the chances of Bismarck giving in to the Landtag, that is, zero.  I don't think the President is going to give up major portions of his signature achievement to a minority within the Senate--and if the same controversy were taking place with the roles reversed, I don't think that I would want a Democratic president to give in, either.  Unless the Democrats cave in at the eleventh hour, that leaves two possibilities.  The first is that the Republican Senate leadership will find a way around the filibuster rule so as to pass the continuing resolution on a simple majority vote.  Majority Leader John Thune has already done this with respect to several other important issues, some budget-related, in recent months, and this is probably the most likely outcome.  The second possibility is that Trump, like Bismarck, will simply disregard the plain language of the constitution and claim authority to borrow the money to keep the government going whether Congress passes a continuing resolution or not.  That would surely provoke a court challenge, but the Supreme Court has always been reluctant to intervene in disputes between the executive and legislative branches.

The wars Bismarck fought, both for foreign policy reasons and to secure his position at home, created a new domestic consensus within Prussia and ultimately within Germany as a whole.  Trump does not seem to have any intention of fighting a war of sufficient scale to do that, even if one were readily available.  I expect the US eventually to emerge from its current crisis with some new consensus established, but I can't as yet see exactly how that will happen.

A Reichstag Fire

 Shortly before President Trump's inauguration, the activist Christopher Rufo wrote a piece warning that violent leftwing groups in the District of Columbia would try to disrupt the event, and tying such groups to a network of leftwing organizations.  That disturbed me because it sounded as if Rufo, and perhaps allies within the new administration, were hoping for something like that to occur so that it could take drastic action against opponents.  I was not particularly surprised that nothing happened.   Tonight, it seems, senior administration officials have briefed leading press outlets warning that the administration is going to use the assassination of Charlie Kirk in exactly this way.

An historical parallel had already been on my mind.  On February 27, 1933, four weeks after Adolf Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany, a Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe set the Reichstag--the German parliament--on fire, and it burned to the ground.  Just one day after the fire the German president, Paul von Hindenburg, issued a decree suspending freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and the right of habeas corpus within Germany, as the Nazi government blamed the German Communist Party and warned of an effort to take over all Germany.  Meanwhile, neutral observers inside and outside of Germany concluded that the Nazis had actually set the fire themselves.  One week later Hitler's coalition won a bare majority in Parliament, and the new Reichstag essentially ceded all its powers to Hitler a few weeks later in the Enabling Act.  Thousands of anti-Nazis were arrested and sent to concentration camps.  The Nazis arrested and tried three communist leaders, as well as van der Lubbe, for the fire, but the German courts had not yet lost all their independence and the three leading communists were acquitted.  Decades later, a new generation of German historians concluded that Van der Lubbe had in fact set the fire all by himself, just as he had claimed.

Tonight's stories suggest that the administration will use Kirk's assassination the same way--albeit with even less excuse.  Tyler Robinson, the young man arrested for killing Kirk, clearly has no ties to any leading leftist organization, and despite the regrettable statements of the Governor of Utah, no clear evidence of his political views has yet been released.  Interestingly enough, already an online chorus has proclaimed that Robinson is an acolyte of Nick Fuentes, another right wing influencer who has been feuding with Kirk, but there is no evidence for that either.  Nor can the situation in the United States with respect to violence really be compared to Germany in 1932-33, when the Nazis, the Social Democrats and the Communists all had uniformed militias including hundreds of thousands of men who had battled each other in the streets for years, with significant loss of life.   Yet senior officials have told reporters that the administration may try to take the non-profit tax exemption away from George Soros's Open Society Foundations [sic] and the Ford Foundation on the grounds that they support left wing groups that carry out violence against conservatives.  They may also try to charge them under the RICO law, and President Trump has talked about designating ANTIFA--which has little or no organization--as a terrorist group.   I would not be surprised if the administration also tried to designate any protesters on behalf of Palestinian rights as terrorists, since many conservatives already identify such protesters as Hamas supporters.

As Donald Trump has found out himself, the government can impose huge burdens on anyone that it chooses to accuse of a serious crime, even if the target is never convicted.  Cases against leading foundations could stay in the news for years, providing ammunition for Republican attacks and, in necessary diverting attention from the economy.  Meanwhile, Trump has already proven that he does not object to political violence on his own behalf by pardoning all the January 6 rioters.  He isn't interested in toning down our political debate, only in reserving the strongest words and actions for his enemies.  Already he is treating Kirk like a national hero who was killed fighting a foreign war.

We are in difficult times.

The Revolutionary New York Times

It took me some extra time to get to the newspapers this morning because my paper carrier had manged to toss them into a spot from which I could not see them from the second floor of the old Victorian where my kitchen and living room are. Yet the wait was worth it, and I think this edition of the New York Times has real historical significance. It essentially proclaims a war of that venerable newspaper against the current administration--and I expect the administration to strike back. The lead story in the front section describes a failed SEAL team operation against North Korea in 2019, designed to plant a listening device that could listen in to the conversations of Kim Jong-Un. The operation had to be aborted when the SEALS encountered a North Korean fishing vessel and fired on it, killing everyone aboard. The Biden administration did brief Congressional leaders about the episode after it came into office--the Trump administration never did. Everything about the operation is still classified, and I will be surprised if the Department of Justice does not open an investigation of the Times for violaton of statutes about classified material. 

 The decision to publish reflects the ethos that grew up during the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal--that any secret should be published. This has contributed enormously to our loss of respect for elected leaders of every party. The MSM in the 1970s began setting itself up as the ultimate authority on what government should not do, and what Americans should and should not think about it. That was the role the founding fathers tried to reserve for elected leaders. It's a role that Donald Trump is working very hard to regain. 

 Then I turned to Sunday Opinion, the section which, as I have pointed out, was in the 1950s and 1960s called the News of the Week in Review and later changed to the Sunday Review. That section leads with head shots of every single Democratic Senator (the Times does not, apparently, deign to address Republicans), and a long piece by Millennial Ezra Klein demanding, essentially, that the Senate Democrats take advantage of the filibuster rule to shut down the government in a few weeks and keep it shut down until Donald Trump abandons major policies and practices of his administration. The Democrats, he says, should say something like this: "Trump won the election. He is the legitimate president. But the government has to serve the people and be accountable to the people. ICE can conduct legitimate deportations, but there can't be masked agents roaming the streets refusing to identify themselves or their authority. The Trump family cannot be hoovering in money and investments from the countries that depend on us and that fear our power and our sanctions. There have to be inspectors general and JAGs and career prosecutors watching to make sure the government is being run on behalf of the people rather than on behalf of the Trump family." And one reason that Klein favors this confrontation is that he does not think that the Supreme Court will stop Trump from doing the things that he does not like. 

 Klein doesn't mention that the Constitution provides not one, but two ways of dealing with an incompetent, authoritarian or corrupt government. The first, of course, is through elections--which have defeated Trump only once in three tries, and which have given Republicans control of Congress. The second is impeachment, trial, and removal, which failed twice against Trump during and after his first term and which is impossible now, with Republicans barely in control of the House. (And new impeachments after a possible Democratic victory in 2026 would be as futile as the earlier ones.) He does acknowledge, at length, the unpopularity of the Democratic Party and the weaknesses of its congressional leadership. But his whole argument seems to me to boil down to this: No possible measure against Trump can be omitted, because he is doing things that I and people like me oppose. 

 I agree that Trump and his family have embarked upon an unprecedented in-office quest for private gain, I oppose almost everything that he is doing, and I don't think he is competent to be president--but he is, and his party controls the Congress and the Supreme Court as well. They can do what they are doing within the framework of our government, and they may maintain the support of a majority of the American people. And that is not all. 

 The founders left us a wonderful blueprint for a democratic government in which no one would exercise absolute power, but they understood that that blueprint depended upon the citizenry to work in practice. It is not working, in large part, because both sides have abandoned any loyalty to established procedures and rules of fairness, as the redistricting controversy shows. And those like Klein who want to bring the federal government to a halt should ponder another provision of the Constitution, the one that gives Congress the power (by simple majorities) to suspend the writ of habeas corpus in time of invasion or rebellion, as the public safety may require it. I think there are people in the Trump administration looking for a pretext to use that power, and they might do it, as Lincoln did in 1861, without waiting for congressional authorization. The founders did not prefer anarchy to order, and we have to ask ourselves if anarchy would really serve anyone's interests now. And major media outlets might start asking themselves if their job is really advocating routes to a better future, rather than reporting accurately about the present. 

 And last but not least, the section includes a long piece by the high priest of the church of the op-ed page, Thomas Friedman, who has been telling the whole world how to solve all its problems for several decades. Drawing heavily on the ideas of an A.I. specialist named Craig Mundie, who co-authored a book on the subject with the late Henry Kissinger, he paints an alarming and probably accurate picture of the impending ubiquity and autonomy of A.I. systems--but assures us that he has the solution, a very Kissingerian one. The U.S. and China, he argues, must collaborate to create A.I. regulators--themselves a form of A.I.--that will insure that their systems will work to the benefit of all mankind. And they simply must do that, he argues, because it is the only way out. That is why, Friedman has now told us for at least three decades, the Israelis and Palestinians must make peace, too--but somehow, it never happens. 

 I am not optimistic about the immediate future of the nation or the world, because its current state owes so much to developments that have been going on for decades. And to younger readers especially, I say that the real problem of the next few decades is not to avoid various catastrophes, but how to deal with them emotionally. We all eventually deal with terrible events such as the deaths of loved ones, and ultimately, of course, of our own. Denial does not solve this problem. Politics are failing us, but they do not alone make life worth living even in the best of times. We all remain very fortunate to be here on earth. Please do not regard posts like this one as prophecies of ultimate doom.

Is the Voting Rights Act in danger?

This  morning's New York Times includes an op-ed by retired Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse, who graduated from Harvard one year before I did.  I never met her and I have learned a lot reading her pieces, but I am going to question some of the premises of that article today, all the more so since the article typifies contemporary liberal commentary on a number of issues. I would describe the principle underlying that commentary as follows:  if you do not unhesitatingly endorse every step that has been taken by Congress and various courts in the last 60 years to increase racial equality, then  you want to go back to the segregationist era.  This is how Greenhouse characterizes the situation at the moment regarding the future of the Voting Rights Act of 1965:

"Questions about the Voting Rights Act’s constitutionality have long been hanging in the air at the Supreme Court. But it was only this month, in an order expanding a Louisiana redistricting case, that the justices placed the issue squarely on their docket.

"Now that they have done so, with argument scheduled for Oct. 15, there is little doubt that what remains of the 1965 law after its evisceration in the Shelby County case 12 years ago will be seriously weakened, if not repudiated in its entirety by the time the court’s next term is over."

Some history is in order.  The Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964 all included attempts to restore the right to vote to black Americans living in southern states, but none of them  had had much effect in the Deep South, where few if any black Americans voted.  After the police violence against the Selma voting rights march in early 1965, Lyndon Johnson sent the Voting Rights Act to Congress.  Its most important provision, by far, gave the federal government the power to take over the voter registration process in areas that denied black people the vote.  That, as it happens, was how the Republican supermajority in Congress in the late 1860s had managed to enfranchise the recently freed slaves in the South, leading for a very brief period to the election of large numbers of black officials in southern states, and particularly the three states--Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina--that had black majorities.  Reconstruction ended in 1877 and by the late 19th century nearly all southern states were finding ways to disenfranchise their black populations.  Johnson and the Congress decided that enough was enough.   As it turned out, it was not necessary to set up federal registrars all over the South.  The southern states got the message, and barriers to registration disappeared pretty quickly.  I am unaware of any areas in the country today where voters are denied the right to register based on race.

The current controversy over the act relates to section 2, which caused some controversy from the beginning and was amended in 1982.  The amended text is as follows:

"42 U.S.C. § 1973. Denial or abridgement of right to vote on account of race or color through voting qualifications or prerequisites; establishment of violation.

"a) No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision in a manner which results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color, or in contravention of the guarantees set forth in section 1973b(f)(2) of this title, as provided in subsection (b) of this section.

"(b) A violation of subsection (a) of this section is established if, based on the totality of circumstances, it is shown that the political processes leading to nomination or election in the State or political subdivision are not equally open to participation by members of a class of citizens protected by subsection (a) of this section in that its members have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice. The extent to which members of a protected class have been elected to office in the State or political subdivision is one circumstance which may be considered: Provided, That nothing in this section establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population."

The key passage of the act is the last paragraph, which guarantees "members of a protected class"--minority voters--equal opportunity "to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice."  Now I would suggest that electing "members of their choice" has never been the right of any class of Americans since the founding of the Republic.  That opportunity has customary been denied to anyone belonging to a minority political party within a particular jurisdiction, such as Massachusetts Republicans and most Texas Democrats today.  The Voting Rights Act however aimed specifically at ensuring the rights of long-disenfranchised black Americans, and in the last two sentences of that paragraph, it indicates that a "protected class"--that is, minority black voters--have some right to be represented by members of their class, which the drawing of congressional or legislative districts must respect.  The last sentence, however, rules out the interpretation that black voters are entitled to representation based upon their proportion of the population.

Despite that last sentence, I have the impression--and I would be glad to be corrected if it is false--that a number of court decisions have effectively endorsed the idea that enough majority black districts should be drawn to give black voters proportional representation within states.  And nationwide, the Congressional Black Caucus has 62 members, 14 percent of the House of Representatives--eseentially exactly the same proportion as the black population of 13 percent.  Greenhouse's article, while referring frequently to Section 2, completely ignores that last sentence and its implications.  Here is her argument for its continuing application:

"The argument that the Voting Rights Act has outlived its usefulness is easily refuted by facts on the ground. The County Commission of Fayette County, Tenn., recently settled a Voting Rights Act suit brought by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund that challenged the county’s electoral system as racially discriminatory in violation of Section 2 and the Constitution. Despite a Black population in the county of more than 25 percent, the 19-member commission has no nonwhite members. The Legal Defense Fund dismissed its lawsuit after the commission drew a new districting plan with three majority-Black districts."

That change certainly reflects section 2.  But the case of Louisiana congressional districts that is about to come before the Supreme Court--the case that has led Greenhouse to write her article--is another matter.  I quote from her again:

"Briefly, Louisiana v. Callais has its origins in an earlier case, a 2023 Fifth Circuit decision that required the state to create a second majority-Black congressional district. (A third of Louisiana’s population is Black and the state has six congressional districts.) A political struggle ensued over how to carve out a second district while protecting the districts of two leading Republican members of Congress, Mike Johnson and Steve Scalise."

I agree with Greenhouse that the Supreme Court majority will very likely overrule the Fifth Circuit (whose decision I have not read) and declare that Section 2 specifically rejects the idea that a one-third black population does not establish a right to two black districts.  And it does.  This controversy reminds me of Ketanji Brown Jackson's dissent in Students for Fair Admissions vs. North Carolina a few years ago, in which she complained bitterly that the majority was rejecting affirmative action as a means of redressing historical disadvantage among black Americans.  The problem with that argument, as I pointed out at the time, was that no Supreme Court majority had ever accepted that rationale for affirmative action.

This, however, is not, for me, the real problem that we ought to look at.  Until now the courts and state legislatures have accepted the idea that minorities need districts in which they will be the majority, allowing them to elect members of Congress of their race.  My question is, has this in fact been good for democracy?  I am not at all convinced that it has, for reasons that should not surprise long-time readers of this blog.

The creation of majority-minority districts, like many affirmative action programs in universities, law firms, and other institutions, has done a good job of diversifying our elite.  It would only have helped the minority voters to whom it is designed to give representation, however, if we believe that their problems are unique to themselves and if these representatives--still only 14 percent of the House--have been able to use their power to help those problems.  And that is exactly what I do not believe.  Almost every problem that poorer black Americans suffer--poverty, single parenthood, drug addiction and poor education--is shared by a larger number of white Americans and a substantial number of Hispanic Americans.  To characterize these problems as black problems seems to serve the interests of both of our political parties, in different ways, but it doesn't help the lower half of our population at all.  Indeed it has divided the lower half of our population, so that a substantial majority of poor white Americans vote Republican while a large (albeit shrinking) majority of poor nonwhites vote Democratic.  That represents a complete change from the middle decades of the twentieth century--the era, as I have often shown--when income inequality among all races was being reduced.  And no region of the nation needs multiracial coalitions more than the South,  which remains our poorest region and ranks the lowest by many measures of economic and social well-being.  

Republican legislators, judges, and many Republican voters now blindly adopt the position that anything President Trump wants must be right.  Democrats should not in return decide that anything the Supreme Court majority and the administration do must be wrong.  Both sides badly need to move beyond stereotypes both positive and negative.  If the Supreme Court does rule against the current Louisiana district plan this could open up a way to a better political future.  It will not mean a return to the pre-1965 era.

Anchorage and Munich

On March 11, 2022, just a few weeks after Russia's invasion of Ukraine began, I suggested here that NATO should very seriously consider entering the war on Ukraine's side. I did so because I thought the whole post-1945 world order was at stake and because Ukraine was making an all-out effort to defend itself.  Not only did the Biden administration immediately rule out direct intervention, but I do not know of a single other commentator who openly agreed with me.  The invasion did lead Sweden and Finland to join NATO and European nations to begin beefing up their defenses.  The Ukrainians have mounted an extraordinary defense, but the Russian threat has grown bigger, not smaller, over the last few years, and Ukraine has now been losing ground--although it is a long way from being militarily defeated.  In these respects, the situation today is very different from the crisis over Czechoslovakia in 1938 that led eventually to the Munich agreement conceding German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia to Germany, and leading just five months later to the entire destruction of Czechoslovakia.  Donald Trump's meeting with Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, however, does have echoes of the crisis of September 1938 and may lead to something similar.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain actually met Hitler three times in 1938: first in Berchtesgaden when he agreed in principle to Hitler's demand for the Sudetenland, then at Bad Godesberg where Hitler escalated his demands further, and then at Munich, where Hitler had accepted Mussolini's invitation to meet with Chamberlain and French Premier Daladier, rather than attack Czechoslovakia after the Czechs, the French and the British had all rejected his Godesberg demands.  At Munich Hitler got most of what he wanted from Czechoslovakia, and signed a declaration, proposed by Chamberlain, in which the British and German governments expressed their desire never to go to war again.  The situation today is different, of course, because Russia and Ukraine have already been in full-scale war for two and a half years.  The Anchorage meeting resembles the first, Berchtesgaden meeting.  Trump received Putin claiming to want an immediate cease-fire, as Ukraine does, but he apparently not only dropped that demand, but accepted Putin's demand that he receive the entire Donbas region--much of which remains unconquered--in return for peace.  In addition according to reports this morning, Ukraine's security would depend in the future on the Russian government's promise not to attack it again, which, without going into detail, is pretty much what the Czechoslovak government got to insure its future security after Munich.  

Trump now faces the same task that Chamberlain faced after Berchtesgaden: to sell not only the embattled Ukrainians on such a deal, but to convince his traditional allies, the other NATO nations, to go along with it.  Chamberlain did in fact persuade both Czechoslovakia and his French allies to agree to the cession of the Sudetenland after Berchtesgaden.  President Benes of Czechoslovakia did not threaten to fight Germany alone and gave in, and the French government was more interested in keeping Britain on their side in case war with Germany eventually broke out than in standing up for Czechoslovakia, with which they had a treaty of alliance.  Now Zelensky has already said that he will not accept the formal transfer of any territory to Russia, and he will almost surely insist--as I believe he should--on the freedom to conclude security agreements with other powers.  Whether he could fight on if Trump washed his hands of the conflict depends on the attitude of the European powers, how much help they can give him, and on the speed and effectiveness of new Ukrainian military innovations, most of them involving drones, which have so far helped Ukraine avoid defeat while bringing the war into Russia itself. 

Both at home and abroad, I am convinced, Donald Trump cares more about drama than results.  Every week he introduces a new act of the long-running play, Donald Trump, Superstar, identifying a disastrous problem that must be solved and promising an imminent solution.  Like Chamberlain in 1938, he is poised to proclaim that a peace agreement with Russia guarantees peace for our time and claim the Nobel Prize that he craves so ardently.  At this point, it looks very unlikely to me that Zelensky or the major European states will agree to the surrender of additional Ukrainian territory or the renunciation of effective Ukrainian guarantees.  Ukraine has already proved that it is not Czechoslovakia in 1938: it is orders of magnitude larger in territory and population and it has fought effectively for more than two years.  The major European powers are all breaking with Washington now on the issue of Israel and Palestine, and I don't expect them to knuckle under to Trump this time.  In short, it looks to me as if Trump's current production will fail to produce the kind of triumphant climax that Chamberlain enjoyed, briefly, in September 1938.  I could easily be wrong, but I expect the war to continue.