Another Data Point

Another U.S. representative has been shot. (Note to right-wing haters: Gabby Gifford, a Democrat, was the first.)

Don’t expect this to be the last time. We have to recognize that people who buy guns are going to use them. And we have to expect that the mounting frustration of American voters is going to find expression in gun violence.

Between gerrymandering, voter suppression and the outrageous role of big money in our elections, our representatives — and I would submit GOP representatives in particular — are effectively insulated from the wishes of their constitutional constituents (not to be confused with their financial constituents).

We can, for example, expect the U.S. Senate to follow the House of Representatives to pass a healthcare bill the the American public does not want, effectively depriving tens of millions of American of health insurance, either directly through cuts in Medicaid, or indirectly through skyrocketing premiums for the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions.

And ironically, the GOP at the state and federal level continues to countenance the inundation of our society with instruments of designed to kill human beings, despite the disapproval of the citizenry.

And of course, Mitch McConnell’s ingenius, evil obstructionism stymied a president twice elected by the people.

When the people who have bought into the GOP and Trumps message realize they’ve been duped, some of the disproportional number of gun owners among them may well react violently. The politics of naked power may face the power of violence.

This is not the sign of a healthy democracy. Frankly, I blame GOP leadership and its plutocratic supporters for that.

So people are frustrated, and too, too many have guns. As a practical matter, it would be technically easier to get the GOP to start listening to the American people, than to get hundreds of millions of handguns and assault weapons out of the hands of the declining number of people who own them.

We need more democracy and fewer guns. But if we don’t get at least one of these, expect more appalling events like the one that took place last Wednesday.

The Wisconsin State Assembly’s call for a constitutional convention – supposedly to pass a balanced budget amendment – may be a chance for the public to finally declare total war on ALEC, the right wing organization responsible for some of the most reprehensible legislation coming out of GOP-held state legislatures across the country.

Leaving aside questions about the wisdom of enforcing balanced federal budgets (spoiler alert: it’s foolish), the question we need to ask is why a constitutional convention, when an amendment would do.

The answer of course, is that the real aim of the convention would be to rewrite the constitution in ways that serve the ALEC agenda, and upend much of the social progress of the 20th century –indeed, the last 200. In the crosshairs would be:

• Voter rights
• Progressive (fair share) taxation
• First amendment guarantees
  • right to assemble
  • freedom of religion – all religions
  • freedom of the press
• Workers’ rights
• Women’s healthcare
• Anti-segregation decisions

Our country has not had a constitutional convention since the first one – not even after the Civil War. One reason is that a convention would open a pandora’s box and threaten our American government in ways most of us can’t even contemplate.

The argument for a balanced budget is a Trojan Horse: The call for a constitutional convention is an attempt to enshrine government by the wealthiest in our Constitution.

I’m grateful to Nicole Tieman for her effort to delegitimize the complaints of people who have attended the Sensenbrenner town hall meetings (“Sensenbrenner aide: Town hall ‘uprising’ is scripted and doesn’t reflect the people,” March 30 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel).

She’s shown that the dissent has clearly touched a nerve.

I’ve been engaged in political activity of various kinds for years, and I’m meeting many new people, newly  engaged in the governance of their country — far too many to be accounted for by “scripts.”

The Indivisible movement has offered legitimate — and apparently effective — ways for people to channel their worry, and occasional outrage, over affairs in Trump’s Washington. It’s true that people  — including, presumably, people in Sensenbrenner’s offices — frequently use “talking points” to help clarify their own thinking. But the surge in citizens’ concern over bad policies and frustration over ineffective governance is unlike anything I’ve seen. If spontaneous does indeed mean “coming or resulting from a natural impulse or tendency,” the word fits perfectly.

(By the way, among the tips from Indivisible is an admonition to behave in a cordial and dignified way; There are no “scripts” calling for disruption. Indeed, it’s in the dissenters’ interest to have as many of their voices heard as possible, and they know it. Note also that disruptions, while unfortunate, pre-date the Indivisible movement, as those who regularly town halls can tell you.)

If Ms. Tieman is hoping to provide excuses for Rep. Sensenbrenner to forego future town halls, she’d better come up with a better reason than legitimate dissent that she finds disagreeable, instead of ginning up tall tales about torches and pitchforks.

I applaud the congressman’s longstanding willingness to attend town halls, and, while I don’t expect it, I would view it as an act of cowardly disservice to his constituents if he hid behind such flimsy excuses such as Ms. Tieman has offered.

If you, like so many others, are concerned about the turn things have taken since November, join us! You won’t be scripted or incited to riot.
But you will be heard.

Greg Walz-Chojnacki
Wauwatosa, WI

What have we learned from the failure of the AHCA, the GOP’s attempt  to supposedly “repeal and replace” Obama’s ACA?

The most obvious takeaway is that Trump doesn’t care about his campaign promises. He promised something better than Obamacare, but instead supported a bill that would result in fewer Americans having healthcare and higher costs for those who did have it under the ACA.

We learned that Paul Ryan is not a serious policy wonk who can create acceptable policy; he cobbled together a bill so wretched that he couldn’t even bring it to a vote, for fear of an even greater humiliation than he did endure.

We learned that, in fact, most people do want Obamacare, which is why so many congressional Republicans opposed the so-called “repeal and replace” bill they were offered by Ryan. That’s not to say Americans don’t see problems with the the current law, but they want it improved, not destroyed. Everyone saw that Ryan’s bill was no improvement.

We learned that Republicans are good at getting elected, but very, very bad at governing. Trump showed little sign of knowing what was in the bill. Ryan seemed to have no idea what his own party members would accept. The Republican Congress as a whole – which was great at stopping Obama – can’t agree among themselves how to actually replace something they spent 7 years trying to destroy.

Finally, we saw that the GOP leadership was willing to sell out Americans – 24 to 56 million Americans – to give tax breaks to the wealthy. Remember that as you watch the coming debate on tax reform – or should I say “tax reform.”

It’s getting to be hard to see how Donald Trump will complete his term as president.

Leaving aside the potential for impeachable offenses, past, present, or future, I think there’s a fundamental hurdle that Trump may find insurmountable.
America isn’t his personal businesses. He doesn’t run it. It’s not his creation, something he can use any way he likes.

In particular, the American system of government has a baked-in balance of power that is unlike anything Trump has dealt with as an adult.

He cannot act by fiat. He cannot define a reality and expect everyone to conform to it.

He’s the president, he’s not the boss. The citizenry is the boss, and the wisdom of the constitution is that the system of checks and balances ultimately leaves control to the voters.

Throw in the “fourth estate,” the news media, and the system of checks and balances becomes even more robust. Trump has made a living manipulating the media, but we’re seeing the limits of his mastery of the media’s journalists.

Many times the system has faltered, but it has recovered and maintained its dominating role in the way America works.

All this is likely to lead to unbearable frustration for Trump, who has spent a lifetime making his own rules, and by and large getting away with it. But now he’s up against one of the things that makes America great, something that has stood up for more than two centuries, through wars — even a cataclysmic civil war — economic panics and depressions, even existential threats like the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I think it’s safe to say that Trump doesn’t really understand this, but its bigger than he is, and I don’t think he can abide that.

His way of re-establishing control over his reality will be to abandon the system that imposes reality on him.

And, disruptive as may that prove to be, it will be another triumph of the American way of government.

Conservatives are famous for saying they want “to starve the beast,” by which they mean the federal government (and more recently, state governments).

Let’s stick with the beast metaphor, but try this on for size: The beast is actually a guard dog, protecting us from rampant capitalism — the real beast we need to worry about.

Our government may be a beast, but we hold the leash, which is our vote. Not so the corporate beast, which is a ravenous predator whose only limit is the occasional collapse of the ecosystem it exploits to extremes, if left unchecked.

Of course, a guard dog can get fat and lazy. It can be tamed by treats, offered by people seeking to gain its trust — or at least acquiescence. But that can be avoided by the vigilance of those holding the leash.

In our metaphor, of course, we see our elected officials — collectively, our guard dog — being tamed by corporate money, which they begin to seek immediately after election.

We need our guard dog, but it must be brought to heel, not by corporate millions, but by millions of our votes.

The first thing that must be said is that, as appalling as the “groping tape” shows Trump to be, it’s disappointing  that this election could turn on sexual offensiveness, rather than on the substantive threat a Trump presidency poses to the nation and the world.

Trump was always easily identifiable as a person intellectually and temperamentally unsuited for the presidency. Yet the GOP leadership lined up behind him – Paul Ryan and Rance Priebus are still lined up behind him.

Now, as the GOP tries to distance itself from Trump, it’s worth emphasizing that the GOP is running for cover not for what Trump would do to country, but because of what he’d do to the Republican Party.

But what has Trump already done? He has exposed the GOP’s dog-whistle appeals to hate and fear , promoting policies that are demonstrably bad for most Republican voters and for the nation as a whole. Trump’s divisive, outrageous rhetoric has garnered support from people who were tired of the GOP whispering the same things Trump has bellowed.

The base supported a catastrophic war in Iraq. The base supports a Congress that is devoted to the interests of the 1%. The base supported Paul Ryan, a counterfeit “policy wonk” who sprinkles magic dust over budget plans that would gut Social Security and Medicare – for ideological reasons, not out of  fiscal necessity.

I doubt that Rance Priebus and Paul Ryan share Trump’s contempt for women (unless they are poor women), but it is a serious mistake to suppose that they not complicit in the GOP ideology and tactics that have made Trump’s presidential candidacy a reality.

• Would the American military obey Donald Trump?
  Seems to me that there might be actions ordered by Trump that the military would simply refuse to take. This, I believe, would be unprecedented and highly problematic, but then, so is Trump.
• There are two ways to do a revolution:
  Sudden, violent overthrow of the government
  Slow, incremental change by the electoral process.
  Not in a single election, pace Bernie Sanders.

After the Newtown shootings, a British journalist was heard to observe that if the killing of children was tolerable, the gun debate in the U.S. was over.

That may have changed. The killing of 5 police officers in Dallas might finally galvanize public opinion on gun control in a way that nothing has — at least for 50 years.

Dallas, of course has a fraught history with firearms. Because Lee Harvey Oswald used a mail-order rifle to kill President Kennedy, the NRA supported both banning mail-order sales of rifles and the 1968 Gun Control Act.

An illuminating article in the Atlantic Monthly, “The Secret History of Guns,” notes that the Black Panthers’ exercise of  their right to bear arms is what led to the passage of the Mulford Act in California, which repealed a law allowing public carrying of loaded firearms.

But as Mike Weisser, AKA Mike the Gun Guy, observed in an interview with The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos, the spectacle of a white motorist being beaten in L.A. following the Rodney King verdict was a defining moment in the NRA’s campaign to use fear — and racial fear –  as a way to promote gun ownership.

[See The Second Amendment’s Second-Class Citizens]

Now a black gun owner professing to want to kill white police officers is implicated in the shooting of 12 Dallas cops, five fatally. It must finally appear to its members that the NRA has opened a Pandora’s Box in much the same way the the GOP’s messaging has ultimately led to the nomination of Donald Trump. Crazy talk leads to crazy actions.

One of the painful ironies is that the Dallas Police Department appears to be one of country’s most respectful and respected. (Listen to Rev. Michael Waters speak to NPR.) And as the Falcon Heights shooting suggests, the proliferation of guns in black communities is unnerving to police.

Another irony is that the extra-judicial killing of the Dallas suspect, Micah Xavier Johnson, will likely be viewed by many as further proof that black lives don’t matter to police. I’ll personally suspend judgment as to whether the robot-delivered bomb was the only solution to the standoff, but I’m sure others won’t.

The killings in Dallas are shocking and horrifying, but aren’t we all, somewhere deep inside, a little surprised that it didn’t happen sooner?

We can expect the killings by police and of police — and vastly more frequently of American citizens by other citizens — to continue until we recognize that the proliferation of instruments designed  to kill human beings — designed to kill human beings — is morally unacceptable, and must not only be halted, but reversed.

It won’t be easy, but the alternative is simply intolerable.

Hearing Donald Trump’s ludicrous response to the mass murder in Orlando takes one’s breath away.

It’s not so much that Trump says what he says, but that, knowing he is capable of saying such things – can be expected to say such things – the GOP has embraced him as their candidate. Surely this is a party that has completely lost any claims to credibility.

Rather than pretending that the U.S. under President Obama has been working steadily and vigorously to defeated ISIS and other forms of Islamicist terror, Trump should be asking – as we all should – how is it that a person in the U.S. can legally obtain the capacity to kill 50 people.

Bernie Sanders needs to do the right thing.

If he wants to continue to run, God bless him.

But if he wants to run on the trope that there’s no difference between Hillary Clinton and any of her possible GOP opponents, then he’s doing the country and his supporters a grave injustice.

As to his complaints about independents being unable to vote for him in New York, that’s really a self-indictment of his own incompetence. The rules were there for all to see; he should have warned his supporters months ago about the voting rules in New York. That his campaign failed to do so doesn’t speak to his ability to assemble a competent economic team, a competent foreign policy team, or a competent cabinet.

One has to wonder whether a President Sanders response to other unnoticed realities — in the Middle East, in Russia, or in Congress — would be more whining about fairness.

It’s no secret that this country has serious problems — and that the future of our youth is imperiled by the income inequality that Sanders has so effectively brought to the public conversation.

But Sanders had better let his youthful supporters know that he isn’t the only answer to their problems, that there are other people — lots of them — with opposing views that must be taken into consideration, and that politics is the art of dealmaking between opponents, or it’s about pure power, which history tells us always ends badly.

“I think what [Trump]’ll do to the Republican Party is really make us question who we are and what we’re about. And that’s something we don’t want to see happen.”

— Nikki Haley

It’s hard to think of a better summary of the ossification of the GOP’s intellectual foundations than this observation by the South Carolina governor.

The GOP has become the party of naked power. That’s the only way to make sense of the so-called policies they propose — destruction of the safety net, of the environment, the ludicrous denial of climate change, and the even more ludicrous defense of the proliferation of handguns and assault weapons in the hands of the untrained masses.

Of course they don’t want to engage in a little honest self-examination: They are intellectually – and to a large extent morally – bankrupt.

Who wants to see that in themselves?

It’s understandable that Mitch McConnell doesn’t want Barack Obama to nominate the next Supreme Court Justice. I didn’t want Ronald Reagan to nominate Antonin Scalia, or George W. Bush to nominate Samuel Alito or John Roberts.

But that’s the way our government works, and any adult should be willing to live with that.

McConnell is no ordinary adult, however. He acts like spoiled child who thinks he gets to change the rules in the middle of the game if he doesn’t like the results.

We elect a president for four years, and President Obama would be guilty of dereliction of duty if he did not nominate a justice to replace Scalia. And the Senate would fail to do its constitutional duty if they did not confirm the appointment in due time.

While while we’re on the subject of rule changing, let’s briefly look at Paul Ryan’s wish for a “mandate” (JSOnline Jan. 23, 2016).  The GOP cannot have a mandate until they represent the majority of Americans, which, because of gerrymandering and voter suppression techniques like photo ID requirements, they may never do. Wisconsin offers the perfect example. In the 2012 election, Republicans won 47% of the popular vote, but 61% of the assembly seats. (See “Our Votes Don’t Matter.”)

Whatever you may think of the Republicans’ policy ideas, no lover of the American way of self-governance should tolerate the rule-bending and rule-breaking the GOP is conducting in our state and in our nation,