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The day after calling on people to “lower the temperature in our politics,” President Biden resort to traditionally divisive language in an interview with NBC's Lester Holt.
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One day and 28 minutes
Jul 26, 2024
Breslin is the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair of Political Science at Skidmore College and author of “A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans Would Rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law.”
This is the latest in “A Republic, if we can keep it,” a series to assist American citizens on the bumpy road ahead this election year. By highlighting components, principles and stories of the Constitution, Breslin hopes to remind us that the American political experiment remains, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, the “most interesting in the world.”
One day.
One single day. That’s how long it took for President Joe Biden to abandon his call to “lower the temperature in our politics” following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. “I believe politics ought to be an arena for peaceful debate,” he implored. Not messages tinged with violent language and caustic oratory. Peaceful, dignified, respectful language.
That was on Sunday evening, July 14. And yet by Monday evening — one day later — he was back on primetime television, this time with Lester Holt, and his tone had changed. Within three minutes of the start of the interview, Biden returned to the language of division. “Look,” he exclaimed, “I’m not the guy that said, ‘I want to be a dictator on day one.’ I’m not the guy that refused to accept the outcome of the election. I’m not the guy who said that [he] wouldn’t accept the outcome of this election automatically.”
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Twenty-eight Minutes.
Less than a half hour. That’s how long it took for former President Trump to abandon his call for unity. The setting was the Republican National Convention, and the occasion was Trump’s official nomination for president. His speech started promisingly. “The discord and division in our society must be healed,” he announced. “We must heal it quickly. As Americans, we are bound together by a single fate and a shared destiny. We rise together. Or we fall apart.”
But within the span of a standard sitcom (with ads), Americans were treated to a jarring return to the vitriol and dissension that has characterized this entire election. The scorn and fury of the Donald Trump show was back: “[T]o achieve [a conservative] future,” he railed, “we must first rescue our nation from failed and even incompetent leadership. We have totally incompetent leadership! Under the current administration, we are indeed a nation in decline.”
Enough! How manysurveys do we need to conduct for the leaders of both parties to realize Americans are fed up? How many opinion pieces do we need to write asking for more civility in our political dialogue? How many more American citizens have to say they are angry, frustrated, disillusioned and despondent? How many of us pang for the good old days when Barack Obama and Mitt Romney squared off?
The news that Biden will “stand down” and not seek reelection is an opportunity for a reset, a chance to correct the deeply divisive tone that has stained this election. Trump’s claim that Biden is “the single worst president by far in the history of our country,” as he predictably declared only minutes after the Democratic president stepped away from the campaign, is the usual Trump hyperbole. The only difference is that now it is a moot point. Whether the Democratic nominee is Vice President Kamala Harris or one of the half-dozen other capable and electable contenders, this moment offers a unique opening. A fresh start is rare in American politics. Both candidates must take it.
I fully understand that candidate displays of righteous anger often amount to a winning electoral strategy. Elections are the ultimate in-group contest. Americans like to feel solidarity with similarly inclined partisans and, inevitably, the best resin for one’s group is a common disdain for another. Time and again in this and previous election cycles we’ve seen parties and presidents energize their followers not by efforts at conciliation, but by demonstrations of division. It’s pervasive on both sides of the aisle.
And then there are the distressing corollaries that spawn from relentless divisiveness. I’m thinking of political narcissism. To this point in the election, both major party candidates have touted that only they can “save America.” Trump is explicit: “I can stop wars with a phone call,” he boasted during his acceptance speech. This follows a chorus of moments where he has claimed, “I alone can fix [America].”
Biden was more subtle. But even he resorted to narcissistic messaging before dropping out of the race. The president retorted that only he could beat Trump when allies were calling for his stage exit. He would later soften that stance, admitting others could beat the former president. But even then, the message turned to, “I” am best positioned to hold on to the White House. Even Trump, the standard bearer for the personal credit claim, used “we” pronouns more frequently than his rival from Delaware.
What has been missing in this presidential campaign (until Biden’s selfless act) was any trace of humility. Let’s hope we can unearth some more in the weeks and months ahead. Perhaps the way to jumpstart a more authentic, more humble campaign is to appeal to the words of a great American president, Abraham Lincoln, and to remind all political candidates that modesty and decorum can also deliver memorable moments.
After only six sentences of the magnificent Gettysburg Address — only 90 seconds into his speech — Lincoln confessed to his own triviality. “[I]n a larger sense,” he acknowledged, “we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate — we cannot hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”
More solemn and soaring words have rarely been uttered. Today’s political rhetoric bears no resemblance.
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Project 2025: The Department of Labor
Jul 25, 2024
Hill was policy director for the Center for Humane Technology, co-founder of FairVote and political reform director at New America. You can reach him on X @StevenHill1776.
This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a right-wing blueprint for Donald Trump’s return to the White House, is an ambitious manifesto to redesign the federal government and its many administrative agencies to support and sustain neo-conservative dominance for the next decade. One of the agencies in its crosshairs is the Department of Labor, as well as its affiliated agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.
Project 2025 proposes a remake of the Department of Labor in order to roll back decades of labor laws and rights amidst a nostalgic “back to the future” framing based on race, gender, religion and anti-abortion sentiment. But oddly, tucked into the corners of the document are some real nuggets of innovative and progressive thinking that propose certain labor rights which even many liberals have never dared to propose.
Attack on diversity in the workforce
In its opening narrative, the document attacks any policy focus based on the diversity of the workforce. Like much of the MAGA movement, it rejects racial classifications and preferences under the guise of the “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) revolution” and critical race theory. I’m not sure many of the 161 million Americans employed in the United States who are coping with high prices, inadequate wages and startling levels of inequality — 39 percent of whom are minority and 55 percent are female — lay awake at night worrying over the critical dangers emanating from DEI and CRT. But for the handful who do, Project 2025 has them covered.
Project 2025 demands that federal agencies prohibit the use of any racial classifications or quotas related to the workplace, and also prohibit even the collection of employment statistics based on race/ethnicity. And while they are at it, they should eliminate the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, which requires federal contractors and subcontractors to commit to nondiscrimination and tracks compliance by these businesses.
Project 2025 then moves on to gender and transgender matters. The attack on female workers comes in the form of the promotion of what the document calls a “pro-life” workplace and of the states’ right to restrict abortion, surrogacy or other similar “benefits.” Project 2025 also calls for draconian measures against transgender workers, demanding the recission of regulations that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics, including in hiring and firing.
All in all, the strong ideological emphasis on cultural wars within the workplace seems misplaced and disconnected from the working conditions that plague hundreds of millions of American workers. Many of their proposals seem more focused on restoring some nostalgic version of white male supremacy and Christian nationalism than on actually aiding workers.
Project 2025 includes several more bad policy ideas, but also some interesting ideas and even a few good ones.
Key proposals in Project 2025
One bad idea sounds almost medieval. Project 2025 would seek to amend what is known as “hazard-order regulations” to permit teenagers to work in dangerous jobs. “Some young adults,” claims the MAGA manifesto, “show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs” but “current rules forbid many young people … from working in such jobs,” resulting in “worker shortages in dangerous fields.” The Project 2025 visionaries would loosen these regulations to allow teenagers to “work in more dangerous occupations.”
Project 2025 advocates that Congress pass legislation allowing waivers for states and local governments to escape from enforcement of crucial federal labor laws, like the foundational Fair Labor Standards Act (which bestows the right to a minimum wage and time-and-a-half for overtime pay, and prohibits employment of minors in oppressive child labor) and the National Labor Relations Act that guarantees the right of workers to organize into trade unions, engage in collective bargaining and take collective action such as strikes. This provision alone would enact an ominous, far-reaching threat to eviscerate the most important labor laws of the past 75 years.
Project 2025 also would crack down on labor union organizing by banning “card check” as the basis of union recognition and mandating secret ballot elections exclusively. Such a policy would allow employer coercion during certification elections, since many businesses hire anti-union consultants who are skilled in intimidating workers to vote against the union.
It also would reverse Obama- and Biden-era regulations that reined in widespread worker abuses in the fast food industry by holding corporations like McDonald’s and Burger King jointly liable for labor law violations committed by individual franchise owners operating under the corporation’s brand.
Potentially interesting policy ideas
Project 2025 occasionally includes an interesting idea that deserves more attention. For example, it advocates for better quality child care, including on-site child care in the workplace rather than in a separate facility as a way of putting the “least stress on the parent-child bond.”
It also calls for a “day of rest” on “the Sabbath,” defined as either Sunday or another day of “sincere religious observance,” which seems like it could be a good idea for the “No Vacation American Nation,” where workers have fewer vacation days and holidays than any other developed country.
It also proposes the Working Families Flexibility Act, which would allow workers to accumulate paid time off by allowing private sector employees the ability to choose between either receiving time-and-a-half overtime pay or accumulating time-and-a-half overtime off.
The manifesto also somewhat recognizes that immigrant workers suffer frequent employer exploitation via the H-2A visa program that allows temporary agricultural workers into the United States. But their primary concern is that the low cost and expanding numbers of H-2A workers undercut jobs for American workers in agricultural employment, so they want a gradual phasedown and a cap on this program. But I’m skeptical. It might be a worthwhile policy goal to prioritize the hiring of U.S. citizens in certain agricultural occupations, but it’s hard to imagine too many Americans wanting jobs handpicking food in the hot sun, backs bent over and exploited, unless the wages were so high that the price of food became completely unaffordable.
In that same vein, Project 2025 would have Congress mandate that all new federal contracts require at least 70 percent of the contractor’s employees be U.S. citizens, with the percentage increasing to 95 percent over a 10-year period. But good luck with that — it’s conservative business owners who want low-wage immigrant labor, so it’s hard to imagine that such a policy would generate support, even in Republican circles. This is more likely a symbolic overture to win votes this November and not a serious policy offer.
A few positive proposals
While liberal organizations and media outlets have warned that Project 2025 is a threat to the American way of life, there actually are some positive proposals that deserve closer examination. Many of these positives reflect the influence of a young economist, Oren Cass, and his “new conservative” organization American Compass, which is not so welded to the libertarian free market brand of Trumpism and has a more benign view of labor unions and government regulation in their market-harnessing role.
William Galston from the Brookings Institute called Cass’s book “The Once and Future Worker” a “welcome common ground for policy debates across partisan and ideological lines.” Cass is listed as one of the co-authors of this part of Project 2025.
Cass’s good ideas include “non-union worker voice and representation” and “Employee Involvement Organizations.” By this he means a U.S. version of German-style codetermination, in which “works councils” in every workplace and worker representation on corporate boards of directors flex worker power and consultation rights, beyond what labor unions provide. Union leadership in the U.S. finds this threatening, but labor unions in Germany are more powerful than their U.S. counterparts, illustrating that such a structure can be a win-win toward cooperation on critical issues like working conditions, wages, benefits, productivity, and employer-employee communication and agenda-setting.
Another good idea is a proposal for interstate compacts that allow occupational license recognition for practitioners like doctors, lawyers, mental health therapists, plumbers and other licensed professionals. That would create more competition in these fields and provide more options for consumers.
Another farsighted idea is a broadening of workers’ access to employee stock ownership plans, which allow workers to become owners in the business in which they work and allows them to receive compensation beyond wages and benefits. Today 14 million U.S. workers are covered by over 60,00 ESOPs, almost as many workers as are members of labor unions, providing over $1.4 trillion of employee benefits. It’s been a decades-long success, and it has always puzzled me that both Republicans and Democrats haven’t done more to promote this policy.
What’s missing is revealing
For workers and labor markets today, the latest trends that are most impactful are remote work and gig platforms like Uber, DoorDash and TaskRabbit. But the Project 2025 manifesto has little to say about these market shapeshifters. Many remote and platform workers are subject to increasingly complex challenges of precarity, such as constant digital surveillance by bosses, lack of separation between home and work lives, employee misclassification, lack of health care and safety net coverage, companies ignoring labor laws, and other types of exploitation.
A number of innovative policies would better meet the needs of the 21st century labor force, including implementing a portable safety net that would allow all workers, no matter how or who they work for, to benefit from health care and safety net coverage for themselves and their families. Also helpful would be wrap-around job and vocational training, in which companies are surveyed about their upcoming skill needs and unemployed workers are trained to fill those identified needs. These kinds of innovations are commonplace among U.S. competitors, like Germany, Denmark and other advanced economy countries.
Yet Project 2025 has little to say about these issues other than token rhetorical shout-outs to teleworking and the need to “protect flexible work options” and “worker independence”, i.e. independent contractors. One small proposal calls for Congress to provide a “safe harbor” from job misclassification penalties for employers that offer safety net benefits to independent workers. This is a small step and much more needs to be done to prepare the workforce for the very near-future of widespread platform and remote work.
For example, the Biden administration is spending nearly half a billion dollars to establish technology hubs in rural areas, so that the employment benefits of technological development are not just primarily enjoyed by urban-based workers living in tech hubs like Silicon Valley or Seattle’s Microsoft-Amazon hub. Project 2025 does not propose anything comparable.
Interestingly, Project 2025 occasionally presents an “alternative view,” in which a different conservative philosophy and policy goals are presented. This reflects the very real debates within the conservative movement about the best approaches toward addressing labor issues and the concerns of working women and men. Unfortunately the sensible minority view within conservatism is mostly overwhelmed by the dominant view and its cultural race and gender obsessions.
More in The Fulcrum about Project 2025
- A cross-partisan approach
- An Introduction
- Department of Education
- Managing the bureaucracy
- Department of Defense
- Department of Energy
- The Environmental Protection Agency
- Education Savings Accounts
- Department of Veterans Affairs
- The Department of Homeland Security
- U.S. Agency for International Development
- Affirmative action
- A federal Parents' Bill of Rights
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Former President Donald Trump speaks at the 2024 Republican National Convention on July 18.
J. Conrad Williams Jr.
Why Trump assassination attempt theories show lies never end
Jul 25, 2024
By: Michele Weldon: Weldon is an author, journalist, emerita faculty in journalism at Northwestern University and senior leader with The OpEd Project. Her latest book is “The Time We Have: Essays on Pandemic Living.”
Diamonds are forever, or at least that was the title of the 1971 James Bond movie and an even earlier 1947 advertising campaign for DeBeers jewelry. Tattoos, belief systems, truth and relationships are also supposed to last forever — that is, until they are removed, disproven, ended or disintegrate.
Lately we have questioned whether Covid really will last forever and, with it, the parallel pandemic of misinformation it spawned. The new rash of conspiracy theories and unproven proclamations about the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump signals that the plague of lies may last forever, too.
Summer ushers in a Covid surge of the new variant that is unfolding in the U.S. and abroad with emergency room visits up 23 percent, and a 13 percent increase in hospitalizations in this country, the Centers for Disease Control reports. Infections are increasing in 39 states or territories and declining in none. The World Health Organization reports more than 1,000 deaths from Covid in this country in June.
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Even though the WHO declared in May 2023 that Covid was no longer a public health concern, the notion that this disease will forever pose a threat lingers. There have been more than 7 million deaths worldwide from Covid to date, and more deaths every day.
The lies surrounding Covid, vaccinations and treatments also still persist, calling into question most every source of news and timely announcements. Covid for many marked the end of innocence for those who believed in the reliability and credibility of news sources.
Reality is freshly challenged as a new Washington Post poll shows that nearly 30 Republican congressional members blame President Joe Biden, the Secret Service, Democrats or the media for Trump's shooting. None of these projections are substantiated.
The infinite future for the Covid pandemic signals a tale of two countries divided into those who are careful with masking and vaxxing due to correct health information and safe practices, and those who defy prevention and treatment because they are part of a political scheme of control and encroachment on their civil rights. The division is once again prominent with the way the Trump rally shooting is interpreted and explained — without factual backup.
Fortunately, last month the Supreme Court denied the lawsuit challenging the government’s right to restrict social media platforms from disseminating Covid-19 misinformation. The lawsuit was in reaction to Surgeon General Vivek Murthy seeking to stem the tide of inaccurate vaccine information that could cost thousands of lives.
The prevailing falsehoods about Covid are not just bothersome or inconvenient, they change behaviors that result in the spread of infections, hospitalizations and deaths. Playing what one expert calls “Covid roulette” with risky behaviors based on false information can result in more cases. Untruths are a matter of life and death.
Politifact has fact-checked more than 2,300 claims about Covid vaccines, including the Instagram post in January that claimed 17 million people died from vaccines. Not true.
A recent Brown University study of “50 papers published between Jan. 1, 2020, and Feb. 24, 2023, that investigated the efficacy of 119 misinformation interventions,” found that actions to counter inaccuracies around Covid and publications are urgently needed.
“Public health practitioners, journalists, community organizations and other trusted messengers are tasked with responding to health misinformation every day,” said co-author Stefanie Friedhoff, an associate professor at Brown’s School of Public Health and co-director of the Information Futures Lab.
Whether or not people believe Covid infections will last another year, decade or century, it is critical to guarantee that reliable, factual information about Covid is available and that misformation is debunked as swiftly as possible.
A March 2024 Gallup News poll shows “59% of Americans believe the pandemic is over.” More than half, or “57%, report that their lives have not returned to normal, and 43% expect they never will.”
Yes, Covid is on the rise and hopefully new vaccine variants can keep the spread under control and prevent deaths. The vaccine for disinformation of any and all sorts is a commitment to what is real and a vigorous rejection of false narratives. Debunking the latest untrue assertions can also prevent deaths from possible political violence.
As a nation, we can and must handle the truth.
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Sister democracies share an inherited flaw
Jul 25, 2024
Myers is executive director of the ProRep Coalition. Nickerson is executive director of Fair Vote Canada, a campaign for proportional representations (not affiliated with the U.S. reform organization FairVote.)
Among all advanced democracies, perhaps no two countries have a closer relationship — or more in common — than the United States and Canada. Our strong connection is partly due to geography: we share the longest border between any two countries and have a free trade agreement that’s made our economies reliant on one another. But our ties run much deeper than just that of friendly neighbors. As former British colonies, we’re siblings sharing a parent. And like actual siblings, whether we like it or not, we’ve inherited some of our parent’s flaws.
When comparing our democratic institutions, Canada and the United States have a range of differences. Canada’s government is a parliamentary democracy, the United States’ is a federal republic; Canada’s government is led by a prime minister, the U.S. elects a president through the Electoral College; Canadian citizens are protected by their Charter of Rights, U.S. citizens by their Bill of Rights. Yet, despite our differences, we do have one crucial similarity. We’ve inherited and historically overlooked the same democratic institution that, incidentally, informs the character and efficacy of all our other institutions: our electoral system.
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When the United States drafted its Constitution in 1787, and Canada structured its government in 1867, both needed to select the rules and methods for conducting their elections. At the time, very few other democracies existed, so there were a limited number of election systems in place to comparatively analyze. So both countries, and most other former British colonies, adopted the elections they were most familiar with: the winner-take-all elections used in Britain’s House of Commons.
Winner-take-all electoral systems, often known as "first past the post" or "plurality voting," are those in which the candidate who receives the most votes in an election wins all the representation, excluding minority views. Among the many impacts electoral systems have on the political life of a country, perhaps most notable is their influence on the number of political parties representing voters. Winner-take-all systems tend to generate legislatures dominated by two major parties.
In the United States, winner-take-all elections are used to select the president, members of Congress and representatives in all 50 state legislatures.
In Canada, winner-take-all elections are used to elect representatives at every level of government: municipal, provincial and federal.
In the United States, winner-take-all elections have produced a fully polarized two-party system wherein representation for one party comes at the expense of the other. Such a dynamic has fueled political division, legislative gridlock and resulted in general governmental dysfunction. This isn’t lost on American voters: political violence is on the rise, Congress’ approval rating is at 16 percent, and 85 percent of Americans believe major political reform is needed.
In Canada, winner-take-all elections have resulted in majority governments elected with less than 40 percent of voters’ support, a near-monopoly on power for two major parties and widespread underrepresentation of voters who prefer smaller parties. A majority of Canadians see political parties as divisive forces, the electorate is becoming increasingly polarized, and threats of violence are on the rise.
While the symptoms of our political problems have manifested slightly differently, their sources are the same: our winner-take-all elections. As a result, in recent years both countries have experienced a period of democratic backsliding and have seen their rankings decline in global democracy indexes. Perhaps most notably, the United States has transitioned from being a “full” to a “flawed democracy.”
Our democratic struggles are compounded by the rising power of authoritarian forces like Donald Trump in the United States. From voters’ perspective, the short-term solution to combating encroaching authoritarianism in the U.S. and Canada is clear: Vote for the parties and candidates that respect democratic norms and the rule of law. The long-term solution, though, isn’t going to be found in the existing frameworks that have harbored the very division and polarization that threatens our nature.
Fortunately, there’s a path forward. While most former British colonies have resorted to winner-take-all systems as their default for elections, most advanced democracies have engaged in electoral innovation and experimentation over the last few decades. In turn, a growing share of countries have transitioned to an electoral system that produces a more representative and resilient model of democracy: proportional representation.
Proportional representation refers to a type of electoral system that distributes legislative seats to political parties in proportion to the number of votes they receive in elections. So if a party earns 30 percent of the votes, it gets 30 percent of the seats. This kind of electoral system reliably produces robust, multiparty legislatures and is used by the likes of Germany, South Africa, New Zealand and Uruguay. Canada and the United States should take note. In fact, in Canada, many advocates already have.
Efforts to raise awareness and campaign for the adoption of proportional representation have been underway in Canada for decades now. A broad network of electoral reformers is working to advance PR across provincial and national elections. Though none have been successful yet, multiple campaigns for PR have come remarkably close to being adopted. Support for PR is also quickly growing in the United Kingdom, especially after this month’s election generated outcomes that some have called “the most disproportional in British electoral history.”
In the U.S., however, efforts to advance PR have historically been eclipsed by more moderate reforms, like ranked-choice voting and open primaries. But as America’s democratic crisis worsens, the calls for major electoral reform are growing and a new generation of PR advocates is emerging. Supported by the academic community, these new efforts aim to advance PR at the state and federal levels. Interestingly, unlike in Canada and the U.K., where the only path to adopting PR is through Parliament, American advocates have multiple promising routes to reform. Twenty-six states have an initiative process, referendum process or both, which could allow voters to adopt PR without the support of the governor or legislature.
Adopting PR in just one U.S. state will be far from easy. It’s never been done before and electoral system design is a concept that remains far removed from most Americans’ political consciousness. So as this next generation of PR advocates grows in the U.S., it’s important they remember they’re not alone in the campaign for a better democracy. Americans have plenty to learn from their siblings to the north, and Canadians have plenty to gain from any U.S. successes. After all, the adoption of proportional representation in one state wouldn’t only be transformative for the U.S., but for Canada and the U.K. as well.
All it takes is one successful campaign to show the world that major electoral reform is possible; advanced democracies don’t need to settle with the antiquated, unrepresentative systems we’ve inherited. We, too, can grow and improve.
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It's up to us to improve on what the framers gave us at the Constitutional Convention.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
It’s our turn to form a more perfect union
Jul 25, 2024
Sturner is the author of “Fairness Matters,” and managing partner of Entourage Effect Capital.
This is the third entry in the “Fairness Matters” series, examining structural problems with the current political systems, critical policies issues that are going unaddressed and the state of the 2024 election.
The Preamble to the Constitution reads:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
What troubles me deeply about the politics industry today is that it feels like we have lost our grasp on those immortal words.
Back in June 2023, on Fairness Matters, I wrote:
“We are getting dangerously close to ending the American experiment. The United States of America was founded — not to unify people around ethnicity, religion or culture — but as a bold experiment designed to create a society governed by ordinary citizens, one that gives full expression to the ideals of liberty, justice and opportunity for all. In its time it was a truly audacious idea. … Sadly, they couldn’t have predicted the modern world we’re living in and never anticipated that their Constitution would still be governing our lives.
Writing from Paris just after the French Revolution broke out, Thomas Jefferson argued to James Madison, the primary author of the Constitution, that the Constitution should expire after 19 years and must be renewed if it is not to become “an act of force and not of right.” That sentiment was echoed at the Constitutional Convention by George Washingto who said: "I do not expect the Constitution to last for more than 20 years."
The Constitution derives its power from the majority consent of the governed. So, at the end of the day, if our representatives choose to ignore the Constitution or act in defiance of it, our only recourse is to hold them accountable. But what happens when one branch of government acts and there is no accountability?
Constitutional checks and balances
Back in 2015, Kevin Kosar, a conservative writer, published an interesting article titled “Why does Congress diminish itself.” He wrote:
“The Founding Fathers set up Congress as the most powerful of the three branches. Per the U.S. Constitution, Congress possesses “all legislative power.” This includes the most fundamental tools of governance and state-building, such as laying and collecting taxes, coining money and regulating its value and deciding what persons may join the nation as citizens. …
The Founders erected a remarkable system of government. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition, in Madison’s famous dictum, and each branch would defend its powers from encroachment. Unfortunately, Congress has not worked that way for at least a half-century. In the pursuit of other goals, Congress has weakened itself as an institution and representative government as a whole.”
But it’s not just Congress that has weakened itself. In writing about the Constitution in June 2023, I explained the brilliance of our Founding Fathers in how they structured our system of government:
"To prevent any one part of the government from becoming too powerful, they created three co-equal branches of government (including a bicameral legislature) designed to work independently and in cooperation to prevent abuse of power.
"But if two of those branches, say the executive and judicial, worked in concert with one another they can absolutely work around, and even reinterpret, the Constitution. Elected representatives in the legislative branch would be virtually powerless to stop it.
"This is one of the most interesting (and important) byproducts of the Trump presidency. It has exposed serious flaws in the checks and balances that many of us thought existed as “law” when in fact it was only accepted practice and not actually enforceable."
When I wrote those words, I was concerned about the “unitary executive theory,” an idea advanced by conservative constitutional law experts that holds that the president of the United States possesses the power to control the entire executive branch regardless of legislative action. I could never have fathomed that the judicial branch would conspire to confer on the president such authority.
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Sadly, on July 1, 2024, when the Supreme Court decided Trump v. United States went even further. The court ruled that Donald Trump cannot be prosecuted for actions that were within his constitutional powers as president. It was a landmark decision recognizing for the first time (and without any basis in the Constitution) any form of presidential immunity from prosecution.
If you’re asking yourself, "Where’s the conspiracy?" consider what Heather Cox Richardson wrote in the July 1 edition of “Letters from an American.” In it, she exposed the fact that the very justices who conferred presidential immunity on the president had lied during their confirmation hearings:
At his confirmation hearing in 2005, now-Chief Justice John Roberts said: “I believe that no one is above the law under our system and that includes the president. The president is fully bound by the law, the Constitution, and statutes.”
In his 2006 confirmation hearings, Samuel Alito said: “There is nothing that is more important for our republic than the rule of law. No person in this country, no matter how high or powerful, is above the law.”
And in 2018, Brett Kavanaugh told the Senate: No one’s above the law in the United States, that’s a foundational principle…. We’re all equal before the law…. The foundation of our Constitution was that…the presidency would not be a monarchy…. [T]he president is not above the law, no one is above the law.”
Sadly, these justices have set the stage to tear down one of the most important principles that has protected our democratic republic for the past 250 years —the idea that no one is above the law.
As I wrote in “It’s never too late to act,” especially after the attempt on former Trump’s life, we need to stop allowing political dogma to divide us. We must come together and work, as our Founding Fathers did, to find a common vision for the future that allows us to work towards a more perfect union.
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