Llewellyn King: The traitorous tribe that kills fellow Americans

President Trump touring a Honeywell mask factory (!) in May 2020. As at many other crowded events he has attended during the pandemic, Trump and his entourage, (fearful of his rebuke) refused to wear masks at this highly publicized visit.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

When a nation goes to war its first step to survival is to protect the homeland against invasion. Every citizen is co-opted: It is their national duty.

We are on a war footing against COVID-19. It has invaded our homeland, and it is slaughtering us. Nearly 300,000 are dead and the vast hospital network in the United States is overwhelmed.

A dark cloud passes before our sun. Christmas promises more sorrow as we wait for reinforcements -- in this case, the vaccine -- to arrive.

The first line of defense against this common enemy, this indiscriminate killer, is a simple piece of layered cloth or paper held over the nose and mouth by cloth or elastic strings. It is a face mask, the simplest of defensive weapons.

But there is in the United States a tribe that has lost its head, reminiscent of Nicholas Monserrat’s great novel of 1956, The Tribe That Lost Its head. (See an old cover below.)

There are among us those who won’t defend their homeland, won’t wear masks, and accompany that treason by propagating a theory that to wear a mask is to grant a malign government total authority over the individual, and to bring about totalitarianism; or that to wear a mask is to cede manhood or endanger our way of life.

Worse, there are those who believe that it is a political statement of solidarity with the outgoing administration, with the embattled president, and the raucous nationalism that is the core of his appeal.

Some won’t wear masks out of youthful chutzpah, believing this is a disease of the old and that the young and the healthy are immune. This is a fiction they have been fed by those who should know better and most likely do know better, most of whom reside under Republican roofs, presided over by that Niagara Falls of disinformation, President Trump.

While the nation is taking fatal casualties which it doesn’t need to take, while first responders and medical personal are thrown again and again into the breach, exhausted and scared, the Trump Republicans can’t bring themselves to join the battle.

While the signs of war — a war with a terrible count in deaths -- rages on, congressional Republicans are foraging for scandals like pigs after truffles. Most of them still won’t condemn Trump for his super-spreader activities, like his rallies, parties and reckless behavior in public, which signal masks aren’t needed.

The trouble is that leaders of this headless tribe, this unacceptable face of what was the Grand Old Party, are so cowed that they won’t check the president.

The Republican Party used to be made up of muscular individuals, lawmakers who took their mandate seriously, not today’s pusillanimous followers. Incredibly, most Republican members of Congress can’t bring themselves to admit that Joe Biden won the election and will be the next president. Had there been “massive voter fraud” this wouldn’t be so. The courts would have spoken other than as they have.

All of this has played into the anti-mask movement and its lethal consequences. The virus doesn’t ask party affiliation: It is an equal-opportunity slayer.

Then there is Trump’s great enabler in the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Even as millions of Americans don’t know where the next meal will come from this Christmas besides a food bank, and rent and utility bills are unpaid, McConnell, and McConnell alone, will decide who gets relief, who gets the shaft for Christmas. He can just refuse to bring a bill to the floor and end it right there. His personal concerns are paramount, not those of the other members of Congress. 

Not only does McConnell not wish to understand the gravity of the situation in the country, but he also seems to relish his ability to exacerbate it, to turn his job into a Lego game for his own amusement.

This will be a bleak Christmas lit by the hope that the vaccine will deliver us from despair and bottomless hurt.

But for the vaccine to vanquish the virus, we must get our shots. If the same idiocy that shuns masks prevails, the war won’t fully be won for years when it could be ended next year.

The sight of victory is the best Christmas present, and it is possible next year if we close ranks. Those who will bear the guilt are known. They are in Washington now.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Web Site: whchronicle.com

James P. Freeman: McConnell the central figure in reshaping the Supreme Court

Perched high above the fray, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R.Ky.) has comported himself in going about the people’s business like that of the reserved Barred Owl: observing keenly, roosting quietly, and acting decisively. Such attributes have allowed McConnell — a tactical and strategic master of parliamentary maneuvers — to calmly consolidate power, particularly with regard to shaping Supreme Court appointments.

President  Trump may have nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, but Kavanaugh’s likely confirmation to the court this year will be because of something McConnell understood almost five years ago.

In November  2013, at the urging of then-Majority Leader Harry Reid (D.-Nev.), Democrats — voting along party lines — changed the rules of the Senate. This became known as “the nuclear option.” As The Atlantic then noted, under the new rules, “presidential nominees for all executive-branch position — including the Cabinet — and judicial vacancies below the Supreme Court could advance with a simple majority of 51 votes.”

(The rules for legislation were untouched, but the nuclear fallout was that the 60-vote threshold for overcoming a filibuster on nearly all nominations was dead; the net effect is that the minority party is nearly powerless to stop these nominations.)

Furious, then-Minority Leader McConnell issued a stern and prescient warning to Democrats on the Senate floor: “You’ll regret this, and you may regret this a lot sooner than you think.”

McConnell could not have imagined that members of his party — and, by extension, conservatives — would soon be the beneficiaries of his prophetic words.

After the 2014 mid-term elections, Republicans regained control of the Senate. The significance of this became apparent upon the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in February 2016. An intellectual heavyweight, he was, by all accounts, the staunchest conservative on the court. And Republicans rightly feared that President  Obama would not replace Scalia with another conservative. They were correct.

Obama nominated Appeals Court Judge Merrick B. Garland, a centrist, to the Supreme Court in March 2016. He was indeed no Scalia. The Washington Post wrote that Obama figured that “the highly regarded jurist might blunt some of the expected political attacks and ultimately embarrass Senate Republicans into dropping their fierce opposition to the nomination.” Obama badly miscalculated Republican judicial motivations.

In a stroke of bold politics, McConnell imposed a blockade of the Garland nomination, letting it languish — without a hearing or a vote — until after the 2016 presidential elections. The action, or inaction, denied Obama the chance to replace Scalia. If anything, it proved a successful delaying tactic.

McConnell could hardly have foreseen a Trump (Republican) presidency but he knew that even if Republicans fell back into minority status in the Senate and Democrats retained the presidency after the elections, he could engineer a filibuster of Garland or another Supreme Court nominee. (Recall that the nuclear option did not apply to nominees of the high court.)

But Trump won, and Republicans still controlled the Senate.

Fulfilling a promise to nominate conservative justices, the new president nominated Court of Appeals Judge Neil Gorsuch in early 2017. Expressing their displeasure, Democrats in the Senate threatened to filibuster the conservative jurist, an option still available to them.

While Reid went nuclear in 2013, McConnell went thermonuclear in 2017.

Republicans in the Senate changed the rules whereby the nuclear option would also apply to Supreme Court nominees, not just lower-court nominees. (Democrats had threatened a similar change before they unexpectedly lost the 2016 election). Last month, The New York Times reminded its readers that “simple majority approval for considering and confirming Supreme Court nominations is the standing policy of the Senate now.”

While both parties have tinkered with procedural changes in the Senate in the short run, Republicans are using it to their advantage for the long run.

The Boston Globe recently reported that Trump (guided by Republicans) has already appointed 44 judges since taking office — “including more appellate judges than any president in American history at this point in his tenure.” He has another 88 nominees currently pending before the Senate. “If,” The Globe asserts, “Trump is able to fill just the current vacancies alone, he will be responsible for installing more than one-fifth of the sitting judges in the United States.”

Barring a political catastrophe for them this November, McConnell and the Republicans will likely retain power in the Senate. Consequently, they will continue controlling Supreme Court nominations and other federal court nominations. At least for two more years.

The retirement of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy means that there are no longer any justices serving on the Supreme Court who were nominated by President  Reagan. However, should just one more justice leave the high court before the 2020 presidential elections, Trump’s changes to the composition of the court would rival those made in the Reagan era.

History will show that McConnell also played a critical role in reshaping the court for generations to come.

James P. Freeman, a former banker, is a New England-based essayist. This piece first ran in Inside Sources.

Llewellyn King: New GOP solons will soon love Big Government

  Welcome to Washington, new members of Congress. It is a city of museums, statues, self-importance and arcane ways.

After a post-campaign vacation, you will be ready to take on the world — or at least this city — and begin to make things right. You are coming here to cut through the crap, straighten out the mess, to return the people's government to the people.

You are feeling good, even invincible. This sense of euphoria and possibility is normal. It is nothing to be worried about — and it will pass.

As most of the new class is Republican, you are going to stop the rot come what may. No more liberal shenanigans, no more creeping socialism, no more welfare state, no more European-style mollycoddling of the undeserving.

You are going to loosen the shackles on business and watch it rise like a jolly green giant who has shaken off his captors, including the Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Internal Revenue Service.

Oops! Before we go any further, maybe you should pick a target.  The EPA and  the IRS are very unpopular — those two are enough for now.

It goes without saying that you are against Obamacare and that should be repealed, or go unfunded, or be replaced with something. Be careful: It may not be as unpopular with your constituents as it is at the country club.

But do not let things like that worry you. You have been elected to Congress. Hallelujah! Reality will not set in until you get to your first caucus, or you see the lousy office you have been assigned, or you learn that that committee appointment you cherished is not coming your way.

Again, worry not. You are about to make a lot of new friends; really nice people, people who will do anything you ask. They have advice about where to live, whom to hire, what schools to send the little ones to — if you have not already decided to leave them back home, which you may when you find out the cost of housing in Washington.

Anyway, the new friends will help you through the intricacies of being a member of Congress. They will advise you on which forms to fill in, how to get your expense reimbursements. Such helpful people. They will also give you advice on issues that are new to you, like net neutrality, the Law of the Sea, and the reason companies have to move overseas.

Amazingly, they also have tickets to wonderful sports events with local teams: the Redskins (football), the Capitals (hockey), the Nationals (baseball). They also have tickets to cultural events, from plays at the Kennedy Center to exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art. It helps so say you love the arts when you are railing against the National Endowment for the Arts, PBS and NPR.

These new friends are the lobbyists, and they have your number already. They know what you like to drink or eat, and whether you prefer to bike, hike or sail. Everything can be arranged. Trust them. They will also guide you on delicate legislative issues; no pressure, just guidance. And who are you to refuse a friend?

Dear Democrats, you are not forgotten but not well remembered either. Your party lost, and you know what that makes you. For two years you must walk the halls of Congress mumbling about income redistribution; how many successes President Obama actually chalked up, but failed to trumpet; and cursing, under your breath, the presence of money in politics — unless it is union money.

There will also be real pleasure for you in thinking up hateful things to say about the new Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and be quoted saying them in social media.

Whatever your party, as your first term wears on, you will get to feel at home on Capitol Hill. You will know how to play the lobbyists, one against the other, and how to discomfort the leadership of your own party. But mostly, you will come to love Big Government. Welcome to the Washington elite.

Llewellyn King (lking@kingpublishing.com) is executive producer and host of "White House Chronicle'' on PBS and a longtime editor, columnist and business consultant.

Flaccid Democrats ignore the biggest issues

Debacle. Bloodbath. Drubbing. Call it what you will. For Democrats, this was an ugly Election Day. But there’s no mandate for right-wing policies in its aftermath.

Arkansas voters chose to raise the minimum wage while electing a senator who opposes doing so. Colorado voters are pro-choice and elected a senator who isn’t. Voters want action on climate change and gave the Senate over to those who are in the pocket of Big Oil. The most rational voters — given what’s coming in Washington — were those in the District of Columbia and Oregon, who chose to make marijuana legal.

The 2014 mid-term elections were fundamentally about frustration with a recovery that most people haven’t enjoyed. The Republicans blamed this on President Obama and claimed Democrats were guilty by association. That aroused the GOP base as candidates played down their conservative stances on reproductive choice and went silent on marriage equality.

Democrats chose not to run nationally against Republican obstruction, under the assumption that their broad opposition to right-wing social positions would mobilize their own base.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, who drove the Republican strategy to obstruct every Obama initiative and then paint Obama a failure, is now warbling the soothing tones of bipartisan cooperation.

Any “cooperation” will, of course, be on Republican terms. GOP leaders will invite Obama to join in on  such “reforms”  as reducing corporate tax burdens, paring Social Security benefits, approving budgets that savage the vulnerable and lard the Pentagon, and cutting ruinous trade deals that undermine American workers.

To pay for infrastructure, the Republican-led Congress will champion the “repatriation” of the dough that corporations have stashed abroad, handing those tax dodgers a massive tax break and an incentive to avoid even more taxes in the future.

This is the Wall Street “bipartisan” agenda and it’s ready to go. Immigration and renewable energy? You can bet they’re off the table.

The White House faces a choice. Will it lay out what the country needs? Will President Obama make his case against those who would take the country backward? Or will he just provide political cover for global deals that stack the deck even more for the powerful and against the rest of us?

He shouldn’t be left to make that choice by himself.

In the circular firing squad already blasting away, Democrats will blame these losses on their own liberalism. Conventional wisdom will urge them to move rightward and cooperate with newborn “moderate” Republicans. They’ll be told that the way back to power is to embrace “centrist” policies on trade, tax reform, and entitlements.

But this election exposed the Democratic establishment’s fallacies. Social issues alone, which increasingly favor Democrats, can’t spur victory. Sophisticated campaign targeting and get-out-the-vote operations can’t substitute for the passion, clarity, and vision that motivate the Democratic base to vote.

Democrats won’t win votes by adopting a corporate agenda. They must drive an agenda that will bring about an economy that works for everyone.

There’s a populist majority waiting to be forged. Millions will rally for full-employment economics, for fairly taxing the rich and corporations, investing in rebuilding the country and educating all children, strengthening retirement security, making college affordable, lifting the minimum wage, taking on the corruption of our politics by big money, and transitioning to the new and more sustainable energy options that will create good-paying jobs.

Sen.  Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, has it right: Voters think the government is corrupted and doesn’t work for them. If our country is to deal with the real challenges it faces — extreme inequality and economic decline for the majority, catastrophic climate change for the whole world, an oppressive war on working people — we the people have to stand up and fight.

Democrats will have to make it clear that they’re ready to join in.

Robert Borosage is the co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future. This originated on OtherWords.org.