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George Washington wanted to use Thanksgiving as a way to hold the new country together in the face of forces that he knew could pull it apart, writes Valsania.
How the first presidentially proclaimed Thanksgiving was the Twitter of its time
Nov 25 2020
Valsania, a professor of American history at the University of Turin, is writing a biography of George Washington.
<p>On Nov. 26, 1789, George Washington woke early. Assisted by his enslaved valets, <a href="https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/william-billy-lee/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">William "Billy" Lee</a> and the young <a href="https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/christopher-sheels-1776/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Christopher Sheels</a>, he powdered his hair, put on his favorite black velvet suit, tied his white neckwear and donned his yellow gloves.</p><p>Finally ready, he set out to travel the short distance between the President's House, at what used to be <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1922/11/12/archives/no-3-cherry-st-first-white-house-house-where-washington-lived-stood.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">3 Cherry Street</a> in New York, and St. Paul's Chapel at <a href="https://www.trinitywallstreet.org/about/stpaulschapel" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">209 Broadway</a>.</p><p>He had an important aim that day — to celebrate Thanksgiving. Washington had thought carefully about this Thanksgiving, the first of his presidency. On Oct. 3, following the recommendation of a joint committee of the Senate and House, he issued a <a href="https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-04-02-0091" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">proclamation</a> urging the people of the United States to celebrate "a day of public thanksgiving and prayer."</p><p>But Washington believed that particular Thanksgiving was a crucial occasion. He would use it to call on the people he now led to hold their new country together in the face of forces that he knew could pull it apart.</p><p>It was not the first Thanksgiving Americans celebrated. The <a href="https://www.plimoth.org/learn/just-kids/homework-help/thanksgiving/thanksgiving-history" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">first</a> took place at Plymouth colony in the autumn of 1621, when Pilgrims held a feast to thank God for their first harvest and invited members of the neighboring Wampanoag tribe.</p><p><p style="text-align: center;" id="sufn"><a style="font-weight: bold;margin:40px auto;font-size:2rem" href="https://thefulcrum.us/st/newsletters">Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter </a></p></p><p>It was not even the first national Thanksgiving, which was held on <a href="https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-12-02-0573" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Dec. 18, 1777</a> at then-General Washington's behest. Nor was Thanksgiving yet a federal holiday to be observed every last Thursday of November; it became so with the <a href="http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/thanks.htm" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">1863 proclamation of President Abraham Lincoln</a>. (It's now the fourth Thursday of the month.)</p><p>But Nov 26, 1789, happened to be a Thursday, and the weather was miserable. Few New Yorkers showed up at the church to see the president, he noted in his diary.</p><p>The president had prepared for the occasion. He also contributed a sizable sum of his own money to buy beer and food for prisoners confined for debt in the city jail. The donation was deemed to be a magnanimous and moving gesture, suitable to the spirit of the holiday. A week later, in an advertisement in the <a href="https://www.loc.gov/rr/news/18th/444.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">New York Journal</a>, those very prisoners returned their "grateful thanks" to their president "for his very acceptable donation."</p><p>Washington's first Thanksgiving as a president may have not been tremendously successful, given the scarce attendance at the church service. Yet it was an important step in his much larger political plan to bring the executive branch to the people's doorstep.</p><p><div class="x12"><div class="htlad-Desktop_Content_Banner"></div></div></p><p>What Washington wanted was a virtuous kind of populism in the new country he led. His populism wasn't about inciting an angry mob; it was about sharing in their rituals, worshiping their God, speaking their own language. And he did so in the sole interest of the American people.</p><p>Thanksgiving 1789, for Washington, was at once religious and more than religious. His proclamation invoked devotional language, literally. The upcoming festivity, <a href="https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-04-02-0091" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">in his words</a>, could "be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be."</p><p>But Washington's main concern was political. The nation was recently formed, and he feared that it could easily collapse. Its many internal divisions and separate interests could be lethal. Consequently, the president wanted this holiday to be a civic celebration in which "we may then all unite."</p><p>As its first president, Washington recognized that the United States was born out of slavery, conquest and violence as much as of sacred principle. Civic unification required acknowledgment of these flaws. Thus, in his proclamation, Washington asked God "to pardon our national and other transgressions."</p><p><a href="https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/5625" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">A tremendously self-aware man</a>, Washington knew that he was a deeply flawed person himself.</p><p>He was a slave owner, a relentless pursuer of African American fugitives and a destroyer of Native American villages. He was also a warrior who deployed brutality against enemies. He was a commander who resorted to corporal punishment of his own soldiers. He believed that he was not a saint to be mindlessly imitated. This made him humble in his duties.</p><p>More importantly, Washington also grasped the power of his symbolic position as president. He sought to leverage that for the good of the nation.</p><p>As president, Washington could not advertise his actions effectively on Twitter or the rest of social media. He had to show himself around constantly, no matter the weather. He had to painstakingly attend balls, plays, dinners, public receptions — and, of course, church. Every occasion, every Thanksgiving counted.</p><p>Through his outings, Washington met with a diversity of people, including those who were second-class citizens or not citizens at all. Women, for example, greeted Washington at nearly every stop of the extended <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/George-Washingtons-Journey/T-H-Breen/9781451675436" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">presidential trips he took between 1789 and 1791</a>. Textile workers in New England, Jewish leaders in Newport, R.I., many enslaved persons in the South and churchgoers everywhere did the same.</p><p>These women and men, in bondage or free, believers or skeptics, played a part in the invention of a new political theater. Maybe, it was just a theatrical illusion. But these individuals — just like the prisoners in the New York City jail — thanked their new president because they felt they were voices in a larger political culture.</p><p>Washington made sure his Thanksgiving message — not simply a message, but a "proclamation" — sounded clear and strong: May God "render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed."</p><p><em>This article is republished from <a href="https://theconversation.com/us" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">The Conversation</a> under a Creative Commons license. <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-george-washington-used-his-first-thanksgiving-as-president-to-unite-a-new-country-150630" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Click here</a> to read the original article.</em></p><div class="rm-embed embed-media"><p><img alt="The Conversation" height="1" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/150630/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-advanced" width="1"></p></div>
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A modest proposal for taking partisanship out of the federal judiciary
Nov 18 2020
Patton was the Democratic governor of Kentucky from 1995 to 2003 and has been chancellor of the University of Pikeville for seven years.
<p>Our very wise Founders established a method for the people to have a direct way to be involved in the selection of our president and our Congress. Then they provided for the two of them to select our federal judiciary. That worked well for almost 200 years. It is failing us now.</p>
<p>There are a few hot-button social issues about which this nation is passionate and divided. Among these are abortion rights, gun rights, gay rights and the separation of church and state. All these issues have and may still come before the Supreme Court. They are all important issues that impact people in very serious ways, but the future of the nation does not depend on them. The important issues that threaten the nation are the national debt, the economy, the federal budget, crime, defense, healthcare and Social Security — things that affect all of our lives every day. </p>
<p>The nation is so divided that we cannot make a rational decision on these important issues.</p><p>A major reason is the selection of the federal judiciary. It seems many people vote on these issues, even when they disagree with their preferred candidate on other, more important issues. His stated opposition to abortion was crucial to Donald Trump's election four years ago.</p>
<p><p style="text-align: center;" id="sufn"><a style="font-weight: bold;margin:40px auto;font-size:2rem" href="https://thefulcrum.us/st/newsletters">Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter </a></p></p><p>Justices on the high court, and judges on the federal appeals and trial courts, are now selected by presidents mainly because they are either a liberal or a conservative. We now have a Supreme Court with five reliable conservatives, three reliable liberals and one not always reliable conservative. We should have courts where personal beliefs are not an issue. Judges should not be known as liberals or conservatives. Judges and justices should not be selected based on their social beliefs, but instead on their demonstrated willingness to decide issues based on the Constitution and federal law.</p>
<p>This is a national crisis. Article III of the Constitution is obsolete. The only solution is to remove the involvement of the two other branches of the federal government in populating the third branch.</p>
<p>The Constitution makes one of the most important parts of our system of government, the privately owned free press, a bedrock of our system, not beholden to the two elected branches, but rather the watchdog of those two branches. Genius. It has worked pretty well. A lot of misinformation is out there but enough rebuttal is available to permit concerned citizens to discern the truth.</p>
<p><div class="x12"><div class="htlad-Desktop_Content_Banner"></div></div></p><p>We need to do the same with the federal court system. Turn it over to the American Bar Association. This voluntary organization's members are educated, by and large ethical, and representative of the people. There are about 1.3 million licensed attorneys in the United States. They can protect the people of the nation as well as the free press can. Let's trust them.</p><p>I propose the federal judiciary be a career path for young lawyers to pursue. There are now 94 trial court districts with 667 judges and 13 courts of appeal with 167 judges. There is one Supreme Court with nine justices — for now. This is at least 843 highly compensated and secure positions for ambitious and talented young attorneys to aspire to. The courts will continue to expand. There will be more judicial positions in the future.</p><p>I propose that the district judges be selected by the licensed attorneys who practice in that district, using secret ballots to select among all qualified attorneys who apply for each vacancy. I would have runoffs between the top two finishers — who would have to be 35 years old with five years of experience as a trial attorney. They could serve until they turned 65 and have retirement benefits for life.</p>
<p>Circuit appeals court judges, in turn, would be similarly selected — but by the district judges in the relevant circuits, choosing from trial court colleagues who want the job. These judges would need to be at least 40 and have been on the bench at least five years when they're promoted, and would have to step aside at age 70.</p>
<p>One proposal for expanding the Supreme Court calls for increasing it to 17 justices and having cases reviewed by subgroups of them but subject to a discretionary later hearing by the full court — the general practice on the appeals courts now. Sounds like a good idea to me.</p>
<p>The eight new justices, and replacements for the current nine, would be selected by all the lower court judges. Judges with at least five years on an appeals court could apply. The top two finishers in the first round of voting would go on to a runoff, and the winner could serve until age 75.</p>
<p>There are about 8,000 new cases filed in the Supreme Court each year. It hears about 80 of them (1 percent, in other words) and disposes of about 100 more without full review. So there are many cases that someone thinks is worth spending a lot of money on but which don't get a fair hearing. This proposal would allow many more cases to get at least an initial high court review.</p>
<p>This will be seen as stacking the court, but changes like this only occur during times of crisis. We have a crisis about selecting judges and justices — and it is destroying the ability of the nation to come together on a lot of other, very serious issues. </p>
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President Trump's visit to Arlington National Cemetery on Veterans Day was his first public appearance since losing re-election.
Trump administration hails most secure election ever, further undercutting him
Nov 13 2020
The wall of official resistance to President Trump's defeat has started to crumble a bit.
A bipartisan collection of federal and state election officials, empaneled by the Trump administration itself, declared Thursday night that this year's election "was the most secure in American history." That statement flatly contradicts Trump's assertions, still being made without any credible evidence, that he's being robbed of a second term by vote fraud.
Earlier in the day, several prominent Republican voices urged the president to change course and accept his loss. They were as varied as Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, polling icon Karl Rove, the newspaper run by the family of megadonor Sheldon Adelson and the party's longest-serving senator, Chuck Grassley of Iowa.
By Friday afternoon, though, six full days had elapsed since election returns made clear that Joe Biden is president-elect — and Trump had neither said nor done anything to uphold one of the remaining unsullied and proud traditions of American democracy: Defeated incumbents right away recognize the will of the people, congratulate the winner and begin facilitating an orderly transfer of power.
<p>News organizations well-sourced at the White House have been uniform in reporting the president is enraged about his defeat but has come to acknowledge it — and is looking to save face, by pursuing his disinformation campaign on Twitter and a weak and miasmic campaign of litigation, while not in any way signaling a refusal to yield power in 68 days.<br></p><p><p style="text-align: center;" id="sufn"><a style="font-weight: bold;margin:40px auto;font-size:2rem" href="https://thefulcrum.us/st/newsletters">Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter </a></p></p><p>As a result, those lamenting the stalled start of the transition, which has meant Biden is no longer receiving classified intelligence briefings, have focused their anger elsewhere: on fellow Republicans who have chosen to indulge the president's petulance, and thereby not anger his supporters, rather than insist at the final hour that their leader behave better.</p><p>"I'm more troubled by the fact that other Republican officials who clearly know better are going along with this, are humoring him in this fashion," former President Barack Obama said in a "60 Minutes" interview airing this weekend. "It is one more step in delegitimizing not just the incoming Biden administration, but democracy generally. And that's a dangerous path."</p><p>The most important break from that pattern came from a bipartisan council of officials that oversees the security of voting systems. Its statement was distributed by the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.</p><p>"There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised," the panel concluded. "While we know there are many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections, we can assure you we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should too."</p><p><div class="x12"><div class="htlad-Desktop_Content_Banner"></div></div></p><p>The head of CISA, Christopher Krebs, has reportedly told his inner circle he expects Trump will soon fire him.</p><p>The panel noted that all the states with close results made paper a central medium of their election — so recounts or audits will be easy and reliable. Nationwide, and in large part because mail-in ballots are on course to account for a record-smashing 43 percent of all votes cast, nine in 10 votes had some form of paper backup.</p><p>While more and more important Republicans gave voice to the notion that Trump's conspiracy theorizing needed to end, the Associated Press reported Friday that more than two dozen CEOs of major U.S. corporations <a href="https://apnews.com/article/top-ceos-met-plan-response-to-trump-ae2790a11be9a73cd3216d17ce06e143" target="_blank">convened on an hour-long video conference</a> three days after the election to discuss what they would do if Trump refuses to leave the White House.</p><p>Biden is ahead in the popular vote by more than 5 million and has now won states with 290 electoral votes, with Georgia and its 16 electoral votes too close to call but headed his way. </p><p>Many of Trump's challenges have been tossed out by judges for lack of evidence, some within hours of their filing. </p><p>Most recently, he falsely asserted Thursday that one brand of voting machine had systematically deleted 2.7 million votes.</p><p>Election law experts from across the political spectrum are virtually unanimous in the view that Trump has no legitimate case allowing him to stay president beyond Jan 20. </p><p>No credible evidence of fraud has been unearthed — and the number of votes involved in scattershot instances of irregularities, mysteries or actual cheating don't come close to significantly narrowing the margins, let alone affecting the outcome, in any state. So there will not be any politically or legally survivable rationale for Republican legislatures to say the results are so muddied they must step in and award their states' electoral votes to Trump.</p><p>The freshest example of the quixotic nature of Trump's effort: His team on Thursday hailed as a significant legal win an appellate court decision in Pennsylvania disallowing a small pool of mail ballots from people who had failed to provide required ID by Monday's deadline. But those ballots had not yet been tabulated or included in the state's results. Biden has now secured its decisive 20 electoral votes by a margin of more than 58,000 votes.</p><p>And on Friday, a federal appeals court in Philadelphia rejected an effort led by a GOP congressional candidate to throw out about 9,300 ballots that arrived after Election Day, which will get counted under an earlier court decision the Supreme Court may yet review.</p>
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President Trump behaved like an autocrat, participating in the election as a fig leaf and discrediting it after losing, write the. authors.
Now there's an urgent opening to really make America great again
Nov 13 2020
McHugh retired in 2012 after 11 years as a justice of the Massachusetts Appeals Court. Marcuss is a retired partner at the law firm Bryan Cave and a former senior fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School. They are on the steering committee of Lawyers Defending American Democracy.
<p>
Mitch McConnell refuses to accept the verdict of the American people. The Senate majority leader is willing to indulge President Trump's attempt to destroy American democracy, by supporting his fight to stay in office despite his repudiation by nearly 78 million Americans and a margin of at least 5.3 million votes. Other Republicans give Trump and McConnell comfort by standing on the sidelines in silence.<br>
</p><p>
This must end if American democracy is to survive. The norms of democratic behavior must be restored. The divisions that have poisoned this country must be bridged. This calls for enlightened behavior.
</p><p>
President-elect Joe Biden has started the healing process by assuring Americans that he will be the president of all the people once he takes office. His history of reaching across the aisle in search of compromise gives hope. He is in a better position than most to appeal to those who care for the future of the country, to persuade them of the importance of ensuring that the mechanisms of democratic government survive. If he is successful, we may see the beginning of the end of the nightmare to which we have been subjected by an incompetent and corrupt president.
</p><p><p style="text-align: center;" id="sufn"><a style="font-weight: bold;margin:40px auto;font-size:2rem" href="https://thefulcrum.us/st/newsletters">Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter </a></p></p><p>
It will be just a beginning, however, unless the abuses of power that have crept into our system of government are recognized and reversed.
</p><p>
One week before the election, a compendium of abuses of power and needed reforms <a href="https://lawyersdefendingdemocracy.org/repairing-our-democracy-a-primer-on-the-damage-done-repairs-needed/" target="_blank">was released</a> by our organization. More than 2,000 attorneys — including former judges and prosecutors, law school deans and managing partners of large law firms — formed two years ago to enlist our colleagues in the legal community to speak out against the threats to our democracy and to demand that Trump and Congress honor the fundamental principles, norms and values of our democracy.
</p><p>
Among the reforms we proposed are:
</p><ul class="ee-ul">
<li>Compelling presidential compliance with congressional subpoenas and requests for government testimony.</li>
<li>Punishing government officials who lie and deceive the American public.</li>
<li>Prohibiting permanent "acting" government officials from exercising any power.</li>
<li>Prohibiting the Justice Department from being the president's personal law firm</li>
<li>Prohibiting use of the pardon power to protect presidential wrongdoing.</li>
<li>Punishing civil servants who work on the president's political objectives.</li>
<li>Outlawing nepotism, especially in the White House.</li>
<li>Prohibiting use of the White House for self-enrichment.</li>
<li>Requiring disclosure of the president's and vice president's business interests and tax returns.</li>
<li>Prohibiting revenge against whistleblowers and others who tell the truth.</li>
<li>Prohibiting voter suppression.</li>
</ul><p>
Many of these proposals will require legislation. For most of our history, legislation was not thought necessary. Most Americans understood implicitly that abuses of power would undermine the delicate checks and balances that make our Constitution work. The experience of the last four years has taught us otherwise.
</p><p>
Without legislation, the risk of repeated abuses is real. In an age increasingly vulnerable to autocracy and the preservation of power for its own sake, we cannot count on what was implicit in the past being what governs the future.
</p><p><div class="x12"><div class="htlad-Desktop_Content_Banner"></div></div></p><p>
Legislation alone, however, is not enough. Compassion and empathy cannot be compelled. Respect for truth, diversity, political compromise, unbiased law enforcement and an independent judiciary comes from within. It requires a willingness to reach out to opponents in order to understand their concerns and grievances, and a desire to find common ground that satisfies competing interests. And it requires repudiation of the instinct for a "they did it, now it's our turn" approach to governance.
</p><p>
The winner-take-all approach to governance makes losers of us all.
</p><p>
Presidential elections are often bitter contests. Candidates frequently claim that an election is the most important in American history and that the future of our republic depends on the outcome. This time the future of the republic really is at stake.
</p><p>
Trump long ago refused to say he would leave office peacefully if the election went against him. He said that an election he did not win had to be fraudulent. He did what autocrats do: Participate in the election as a fig leaf and discredit it if they lose.
</p><p>
In Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar," Mark Antony observes: "The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones." The evil the defeated president has done will persist long after he is gone — unless it is eradicated.
</p><p>
We have the means to do it. If we fail, the good that is in America is destined for interment with her bones.</p><div>
</div>
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