Song Lyric of the Day (John Gay, on Larceny and Lawyers)

Peachum: “A fox may steal your hens, sir,
A whore your health and pence, sir,
Your daughter may rob your chest, sir,
Your wife may steal your rest, sir,
   A thief your goods and plate.
 
“But this is all but picking,
With rest, pence, chest, and chicken;
It ever was decreed, sir,
If Lawyer's hand is fee'd, sir,
   He steals your whole estate.”— English poet-dramatist John Gay (1685-1732), “A Fox May Steal Your Hens, Sir," from The Beggar's Opera (1728)
 
Gay had in mind financial chicanery when he penned these words nearly three centuries ago. But these days, here in the U.S., it’s become more and more apparent that attorneys have been at the center of a different kind of filching: the attempt to overturn the results of the Presidential election of 2020.
 
Lawyers were at the heart of efforts to create fraud where it didn’t exist and to wrest supervision of ballots from the normal observers of the process to legislatures dominated by members of their own party.
 
While the mastermind of the effort was John Eastman (with opera bouffe assistance from Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell—filers of 50 lawsuits contesting the results, and on the losing end of all of them), Republican members of the House of Representatives and the Senate pitched in to help, notably Senator Ted Cruz, as noted by Abigail Weinberg of Mother Jones.
 
A lawyer, Peachum notes, can steal “your whole estate.” Leave out the letter “e” in the last word of that quote and it reads just as accurately for the perilous state of American politics these last few years.

Quote of the Day (Frederick Douglass, on Offering ‘A Liberal and Brotherly Welcome to All’)

“I want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto and the Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours. Right wrongs no man. If respect is had to majorities, the fact that only one fifth of the population of the globe is white, the other four fifths are colored, ought to have some weight and influence in disposing of this and similar questions. It would be a sad reflection upon the laws of nature and upon the idea of justice, to say nothing of a common Creator, if four fifths of mankind were deprived of the rights of migration to make room for the one fifth. If the white race may exclude all other races from this continent, it may rightfully do the same in respect to all other lands, islands, capes and continents, and thus have all the world to itself. Thus what would seem to belong to the whole, would become the property only of a part. So much for what is right, now let us see what is wise.

“And here I hold that a liberal and brotherly welcome to all who are likely to come to the United States, is the only wise policy which this nation can adopt.”—African-American escaped slave, abolitionist, orator, and editor Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), “The Composite Nation,” delivered in Boston, Mass., December 7, 1869, in The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates and Interviews, Vol. 4, 1864-1880, ed. John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan (1991)

In the last week or so, I’ve had a number of Facebook friends share on our newsfeed a Fox News link about how Sen. Ted Cruz had “schooled” Colin Kaepernick over the true meaning of a Frederick Douglass Fourth of July oration that the former NFL quarterback had quoted from. 

I suppose we should be grateful to Fox and Cruz for linking to that great speech and bringing it to more people’s attention.

I just wish the Trump Media Mouthpiece and the sniveling Senator from Texas, while they were at it, could have linked to another Douglass speech—the one that I have quoted from and linked to here in this post. It demonstrates a sense of history, a logic and a compassion that have gone sadly missing in the Trump administration’s immigration policy.

Quote of the Day (Margaret Carlson, With Limited Sympathy for the Devil)

“What an unhappy choice Republicans had to make. As much as the party wanted an alternative to Trump — preferring to be poisoned rather than shot — after a sustained look at Cruz they preferred the candidate with the highest negatives in history to the smug, sour, self-absorbed, dangerously ambitious senator. Still such an outright rejection must hurt. Even the devil has feelings.”— Margaret Carlson, “The Night I Almost Felt Sorry for Ted Cruz,” Chicago Tribune, May 4, 2016

Flashback, November 1995: GOP Forces Government Shutdown

Twenty years ago this month, the Republican Party, given the upper hand in the prior year’s midterm elections, did something it would resort to repeatedly in the following two decades: badly overplay its hand. In refusing to come to terms with President Bill Clinton, they forced the U.S. federal government to shut down.

Americans in prior generations would have been astounded that for five days starting November 13, approximately 40% of the nondefense workforce went on “furlough”—the inevitable result when Congress sent Clinton a continuing resolution that would have raised Medicare premiums, forced him to balance the budget within seven years, and curtailed environmental regulations, among other provisions. The President, backed into a corner, came out swinging. His veto triggered the shutdown.

But even that wasn’t the truly amazing part.

This was: the GOP, having decided they had not really gotten the better of the President (even though he had agreed to their demand for a seven-year target for a balanced budget), refused to compromise again in December. Their continuing resolution passed in November to keep the government going lasted only a month. Their insistence that the President use budget projections by the Congressional Budget Office rather than the more optimistic Office of Management and Budget forced another shutdown.

Only this time, the mad act of destruction lasted 21 days, not just a weekend, as had occurred other times in the past. Unless someone was deemed “essential,” no government worker would pick up a phone or receive visitors at offices. This had immediate consequences, as Social Security checks weren’t mailed and national parks and landmarks couldn’t be toured.

(This threw a bit of a monkey wrench for my own plans for vacation in San Antonio that month. Although I was pleased that the Alamo—operated by the “Daughters of the Texas Revolution” rather than the federal government—would remain open, several of the San Antonio Missions founded in the Spanish colonial period were unavailable for touring.)

When the dust cleared, the party discovered that the American public blamed them, not the Democrats, for the disarray and disruption.

Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who had held the threat of a shutdown like a cudgel over the President’s head since the spring, was forced to back down. His capitulation damaged the GOP leadership in two ways.

First was the impact on Gingrich, who, as a bumptious back-bencher five years before, had helped trash a budget deal that many in the administration of George H.W. Bush were sure he had agreed to. That act of perfidy might have made him persona non grata with the Bush White House, but it had surely raised his stock among restless party members.

His prestige with the incoming GOP “Class of ’95” Congress was enormous: his political action committee had fed them favorite buzzwords like (e.g., "sick," "pathetic," "cheat," "corrupt," "radical," "traitor"--you get the idea), returning the GOP to power on Capitol Hill for the first time in 40 years. His “Contract With America” not only provided these candidates with a coherent national platform, but also invited comparison, as a blueprint for legislative governing, with the “American System” proposed in the 19^th century by Henry Clay, another Speaker with ambitions for higher office.

All of this was catnip to Gingrich, who thought of himself as a conservative revolutionary. "A president who knows how to use the media is in fact President of the World,'' he had told Bush’s surprised OMB Director, Richard Darman, back in 1990. That arrogance came out again as he posed for Time Magazine’s KING OF THE HILL cover story in January 1995.

The 1995 government shutdown demonstrated that, when it came to undermining established leaders, he was not quite the Newt Guevara he saw in the mirror. He made three mistakes:

1) He predicted that Medicare would “wither on the vine,” allowing Clinton to claim that eliminating this popular program was part of the GOP’s real agenda;

e      
      2) He guessed that Clinton would roll over without a fight, not understanding that the President was far better politically attuned to what the public wanted in this instance than he was; and,

      3)  He complained that, on a 25-hour plane flight aboard Air Force One for the funeral of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Clinton had not talked to him about a possible solution to the shutdown—sparking a famous New York Daily News front-page cartoon of the Speaker in diapers, wailing, with the headline, “CRY BABY: NEWT'S TANTRUM: He closed down the government because Clinton made him sit at back of plane.” The image made Gingrich a national laughingstock.

While he survived in his post for another three years after his disastrous shutdown miscalculation, Gingrich was forced to bank on residual credit from the party rank and file for returning them to power. In the meantime, he made Clinton—who had been forced to argue to a skeptical White House press corps after the midterms that as President he remained “relevant”—look like a giant killer, boosting his reelection campaign the following year. Gingrich’s own aspirations for the Oval Office were checked—as it happened, we now see, permanently.

The second way that the shutdown damaged the Republicans was the immediate fallout for the Presidential hopes of  Robert Dole. In vain did the Senate Majority Leader argue privately with Gingrich and the House leaders that a prolonged shutdown was not a desirable “endgame.” Before long, the Democratic Party was assailing the presumptive GOP nominee in devastating “Dole-Gingrich Monster” ads.

In the shutdown battle, the President employed the political version of Muhammad Ali’s “rope-a-dope” strategy against George Foreman in Zaire two decades before. Declining poll numbers had left Clinton metaphorically against the ropes. The GOP, like Foreman against Ali, believed that there was no way he could endure the full pressure of a government at a standstill, not to mention their own constant threats and unconcealed contempt (House Majority Leader Richard Armey and Senator Don Nickels simply didn’t want to deal with Clinton in meetings at the White House, press secretary Mike McCurry recalled in Michael Tariff’s oral biography of the President, A Complicated Man). 

Clinton’s endurance of the GOP’s game of budget chicken marked the beginning of the turnaround in his fortunes. That, and an opportune lift from the economy, proved decisive in his triumph over Dole the following November.

(Clinton being Clinton, though, he squandered the advantage given him by the Capitol Hill Republicans. With paid staff sidelined during the shutdown, only volunteer interns could man White House phones and staff functions. On the second day of the November shutdown, one of them. Monica Lewinsky, flashed her thong at the President. To his dying day, Clinton will rue that he reacted positively to the sight.)

Capitol Hill Republicans learned nothing from their 1995 shutdown debacle. Two years ago, they shut down the government again, for 16 days, over Obamacare. This year, the Department of Homeland Security was almost forced to close because the GOP wanted to have it out with Obama over his immigration policies.

Now, the Senator who infuriated the GOP establishment—in much the same way that Gingrich did in the 1990s—with his grandstanding in the 2013 budget standoff has been rising in the GOP Presidential polls. But it wasn’t until I saw an exhibit over a week ago on Bob Hope and political satire at the Library of Congress that I saw a character similar to Ted Cruz. It was the vicious wildcat Simple J. Malarkey of Walt Kelly’s midcentury comic strip “Pogo.”

Quote of the Day (Ted Cruz, on ‘The Essential Battle’ in Law and Politics)

“In both law and politics, I think the essential battle is the meta-battle of framing the narrative.  As Sun Tzu said, Every battle is won before it’s fought. It’s won by choosing the terrain on which it will be fought.”—U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), quoted in Jeffrey Toobin, “The Political Scene: The Absolutist,” The New Yorker, June 30, 2014

When it comes to the Presidential race he launched today, Ted Cruz might have a different military philosopher in mind than Sun Tzu: Mao Zedong. Just as Chairman Mao began his epic “Long March” of 1934-35 with a long game in mind—i.e., positioning himself as undisputed leader of China’s Communists—Cruz hopes to solidify himself as the authentic voice of the Republican right wing—if not in this Presidential campaign, then a few quadrennial elections down the road.

Cruz might prefer another comparison, a bit closer to home, geographically and ideologically: Ronald Reagan. A dozen years elapsed between the Gipper’s first, half-hearted attempt at the Presidency in 1968 till his victory in 1980. It took that long for the party center to shift toward Reagan, as well.

Running for the Presidency at age 44, after only two years as a Senator, suggests a politician of startling impatience. But project yourself into Cruz’s mind: In 12 years, he’ll still be 13 years younger than Reagan when the latter was finally inaugurated—and still younger than the presumptive Democratic nominee this year, Hillary Clinton.

What I’m suggesting is simple: get used to the idea of seeing Ted Cruz around for a long while. He won’t be going away anytime soon.

Moreover, he’s not a gaffe machine like prior conservative favorites such as Rick Perry, George W. Bush, Dan Quayle—or, for that matter, Reagan--so progressives won't be able simply to laugh him out of this or any future races. At his announcement speech, more than a few commentators noted, Cruz spoke for 40 minutes without notes or a teleprompter. 

In fact, Cruz has argued nine cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Not only has he won five, but he also managed to peel away in those decisions a couple of normally liberal votes such as retired Justice John Paul Stevens.

Too bad he hasn’t figured out the art of persuasion in the Senate. There, of course, he has aligned himself with the forces of obstruction. Toobin’s article for The New Yorker points out that, though Cruz ranks 94^th out of the 100 members of the Senate, he still helped push the federal government into a 15-day shutdown in 2013 over extracting concessions from the Democratic administration over what he called "the disaster that is Obamacare"--a program whose benefits he would deny unlucky ordinary, but will gratefully accept now that his family will no longer be able to depend on his wife's private-sector job.

(There must be something in the water with these GOP newbies: No sooner had Tom Cotton of Arkansas managed to get himself elected to the Senate than he got 47 of his Republican colleagues to dash off that letter to the government of Iran about that treaty being negotiated with the Obama administration.)

All of this is not to say that I find Cruz’ politics appealing. No, sir. Appalling might be the better word for it. There’s no other way to put this: Anybody who thinks it’s a good idea to shut down the federal government, especially in an age of heightened national-security concerns, no matter his Ivy League credentials, is not a bright man.

And then there’s the matter of his record on science. From his Senate perch, Cruz has oversight of NASA. I don’t think this Tea Party devotee is the kind of politician that Dwight Eisenhower had in mind when he signed the original legislation for the agency in the 1950s.

And then there’s the matter of climate change. Cruz was even funnier than Seth Meyers when he told the talk-show host, “I just came back from New Hampshire where there's snow and ice everywhere. And my view actually is simple. Debates on this should follow science and should follow data. And many of the alarmists on global warming, they've got a problem because the science doesn't back them up. And in particular, satellite data demonstrate for the last 17 years there's been zero warming, none whatsoever.”

Had it been Reagan, Quayle or Bush, I might simply say: Hey, the guy mustn’t have gotten the memo about scientific consensus on global warming (or couldn't get past the second sentence). But this guy shows signs of actually having cracked a few books in his time. So, he must have overlooked satellite-data studies such as this one that conclude that “Over the past 35 years, the troposphere has warmed significantly…. The spatial pattern of warming is consistent with human-induced warming.”

No, I think a different book is uppermost in the mind of Cruz right now: the consultant's campaign manual that says a bunch of Iowa farmers don’t believe diddlysquat about global warming and will be damned if they’ll see any of their tax dollars going to a bunch of East Coasters coping with its consequences.

I wonder how much GOP voters are going to embrace him. I mean, get this: he’s a Senator with only a couple of years experience in that body before he decided to run for the biggest job of all in Washington, an Ivy League grad, a lawyer (educated at Harvard Law School, the gold standard), a polished speaker, a son with a foreign-born father, the product of a broken home, and someone who spent time out of the U.S. in his childhood.

On that last point, there is no doubt: Cruz was born in Canada—the northern neighbor that gave birth on this continent to socialized medicine, same-sex marriage, and who knows what else—and remained a dual citizen of that country and the U.S. until nine months ago.

All of that sounds a lot like our current Democratic incumbent—a fellow, you might recall, who has elicited the outrage of a group that became known as “birthers” because of their unusual, fact-free fixation. So far, no equivalent outrage from this group, except for one person—most famous for saying, “You’re fired”—who now seems to want to say the same thing to Cruz. Welcome to the circus, Senator.