Month: January 2020

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The U.S. Senate’s Abdication of Responsibility


It is Sunday, January 26, 2020 and President Trump’s legal counsel has finished its opening remarks. I cannot help but wonder why they even bothered? Ah! The old magician’s trick of sleight of hand. They know full well that their client is guilty as charged but they are thinking in terms of his winning the next election and not of discrediting the House Managers’ case as put forth. They are simply deflecting and trying to confuse the American public by offering facts that have virtually nothing to do with the case at hand. And you should expect more of the same come Monday and Tuesday.

To their shame, Republican Senators have announced, in so many words, that they are part of the President’s defense team. They are going to vote to acquit regardless of how compelling a case for removal is put forth. And the House Managers knew this before the Senate hearings even began. So why do they persist?

In 1999 the case against President Bill Clinton was on a single charge, lying to Congress. And the Senate, then as now, rather evenly split between parties, came within one vote of removing him! What was the lie? He told Congress that he did not have sex with Monica Lewinsky. The right move at that moment in history was to censure Clinton but not to remove him. They probably would have gotten enough votes for censure! Clinton took advantage of an all too willing Lewinsky and the Republicans that it unseeming but a “high crimes and misdemeanors?” Not even close.

The most damning charge against President Trump is his obstruction of Congress charge which the Federal Circuit Court in D.C. has already ruled to be true. Republicans do not like that decision and have appealed the ruling which will probably be affirmed and they then will push it into a very conservative U.S. Supreme Court counting on the justices to overturn the lower court’s ruling. Should that come to pass, and it will likely take two years time for that court’s ruling, then our democratic republic is compromised. The Constitution’s checks and balances between the three branches of government will no longer exist. With the Constitution compromised, our republic could fail.

The world has a lot of democratic governments but ours stands alone with each branch keeping the other two in check. The President can, for example, veto a bill that he does not believe is in the best interest of the country. That bill must then be passed by a 2/3rds majority of Congress to become law. The U.S. Supreme Court can hear cases where the constitutionality of a law is challenged. That happened in the 1990s when Congress approved the President’s right to do a “line item veto” in the nation’s annual budget. The U.S. S.J.C. overruled Congress saying that it was indeed unconstitutional. The Congress has the right to subpoena persons and records from any agency in the executive branch it deems it needs when it finds an executive decision to be questionable. But the President refused flatly to allow for either and was therefor put in “contempt of Congress,” a felony under both statute law and the Constitution.

Republicans know full well that Trump is barred from ignoring a subpoena as ruled by the U.S. S.J.C. in previous filings and as born out by the Nixon and Reagan investigations.

If senate Republicans allow Trump to be victorious, then all future presidents can simply point to this point in time and claim it is within their right to do as they wish. That of course creates an imbalance of power, an anathema to what those who wrote the constitution had in mind.

There are always those who, regardless of the strength of facts presented, will vote to acquit. But to know at this juncture that a 53-47 final vote of removal will occur is about as disgusting a turn of events as can happen. Can you imagine a serial killer who demands a bench trial (a trial where there is only the judge to decide an accused’s fate), who happens to be a beautiful woman, is found innocent because the judge liked how she looked? That is exactly what is happening now because, even though this does not look like a courthouse, there are 100 judges in attendance and 53 of them simply like how President Trump looks.

This will certainly be a travesty of justice and we will be the worse for it.

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As Teenagers Look Towards Their Future


I teach in a fabulous school system, Lexington, MA., though I am just a substitute teacher. I take my job very seriously and try to add to each student’s experience. The two things I most frequently do is to remind them of the tremendous opportunity afforded them in Lexington Public Schools, one of the best in the state. But I also try to reinforce in them that they are both intelligent and up to the task in front of them. Most recently a young man who was struggling with a classroom project kept calling himself “stupid.” I did my best to assure him that he is not stupid, that some things do not come as quickly to one student as another. I told him that at his age I was just such a student.

But I write this article because of an 8th grader, a very bright young lady, whom I have been mentoring for the last several months. She took the time to show me some of her writings which I found to be both well-written and thought provoking. She is obviously a young lady who grasps concepts far beyond her 14 years on this planet. But one of her most important questions to me, in general terms, is “why are things the way they are?” As someone who possess a Masters in History, I encouraged her to look backwards at least 100 years and, in time, I will encourage her to look back further.

What concerned me most about her question, though, was its inherent fear of a questionable future. I spoke to her briefly about my generation’s efforts to change society for the better, the late 1960s and early 1970s. I did not go deeply into it, not because I doubted her ability to understand my generation, but because context is required and so I gave her an assignment to look at women who were improving their lot in the late 19th and early 20th century. I explained her that to understand where you are, you must know from where you came. I narrowed that to include only women so that gender identity, her own, would focus her thoughts on certain historical facts about women, suffragettes, Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, Jane Addams, Lucy Stone and other women who found their niche and worked hard to improve the lot of women of their day.

It concerns me that any student should fear for their future but, considering the times in which we live, it is quite understandable. Today’s youth is bombarded with negative news, the prospect of uncontrollable climate change, political upheaval, losing the “American Dream,” among many other things.

I see it as my generation’s imperative to encourage young people to become involved with changes that will brighten their future. We need to encourage young people in their 20s and 30s to become politically involved. We need them to become outspoken critics of the status quo and to be instruments of change. My generation helped bring about many changes but we forgot to pass the idea of continuing change to our children. And so it is time for our children’s children to take over, to be the ones who define their future, and to reject any idea which runs contrary to their own well-being.