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Dear Group,

In school it used to be taught (and perhaps still is) that the U.S. Supreme Court’s wise judges with their king-like, life-long appointments served the purpose of interpreting the Constitution, assuring the “rule of law”, and guaranteeing that our majority-rule democracy did not run roughshod over the human and Constitutional rights of the minority. It all sounded very august and comforting. I recall only vague awareness of dissent over how the Supreme Court functioned. I saw, but did not really understand, the “Impeach Earl Warren” bumper stickers. In high school history there may have been a passing mention of FDR’s attempt to “pack” the court with sympathetic judges. 

I was blissfully naive. With the perspective of age, experience, travel, and thought I now understand the Supreme Court merely as a sort of ballast to wildest impulses of the Congress, the President, and the people. The Republican/Libertarians have understood this for decades and have worked systematically to fill the Court with judges sympathetic to the concerns of the wealthy. You might ask “What about abortion? What about the ‘right’ to keep and bear arms? Aren’t those those the rallying cry of the Republicans?” Well, in a word, no. Certainly many Republican voters are passionately devoted to these issues, as carefully framed by the Republican thought machine and spoon fed by Fox News, Sinclair News, Rush and company. Indeed, one can hardly be a Republican without paying homage to gun rights and banning abortion…but they are just rallying cries, not the main point. Does anyone think most of the mega-wealthy members of the Koch donor group are passionately devoted to gun rights and banning abortion? Hardly. 

A primary, perhaps the primary, goal of the Koch donor group is to change the composition of the Supreme Court to represent the interests of business and the mega-wealthy over the interests of lesser folk, workers, unions, and, of course, Democrats.

Soon you will hear of the Supreme Court decision in the case of Janus v. AFSCME. It is likely to be another 5-4 decision, couched in supposed defense of the First Amendment Right of “free speech.” You might recall the deceptively named “Citizens United” decision (Citizens United-Part I) was also based on a supposed “free speech” right. In Citizens United “free speech” was the personal right of corporations to political speech. 

On the one hand corporations are supposed to have the “free speech” right as persons to spend unlimited money on political advertising. On the other hand, “free speech” is applied as a cudgel against mandatory union dues in Janus v. AFSCME. Read the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity logic around Janus’ “free speech” here. Mr. Janus contends that, based on “free speech” he need not pay union dues. Never mind the union bargains for all employees and Janus would benefit from the results of that bargaining. In fact, there is even a unanimous Supreme Court case, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, from 1977, that will be overturned when the current court finds in favor of Janus. 

When Janus v. AFSCME was argued back in February, Grover Norquist (famous for his quip about shrinking government to a size where it could “drown in a bathtub”) commented tellingly on his partisan hope for the Supreme Court to declare Janus the winner:  “Try funding the modern Democratic Party without union dues. Good luck.” 

Why does Mitch McConnell deserve a special place in hell? I offer this quote about Janus v. AFSCME from an article I encourage you to read here entitled “Little Scalia”:

It was for moments like these that Senator Mitch McConnell, in 2016, had engineered the unprecedented nullification of President Obama’s nominee to replace Scalia, when he blocked a Senate vote on Merrick Garland. To partisan Democrats, McConnell’s galling land grab wound up being a fitting antecedent to Donald Trump’s election: first a stolen Court seat, then an illegitimate president. For partisan Republicans, though, a solid right-wing vote on the Supreme Court made the chaos and lunacy of the Trump presidency tolerable. “But Gorsuch” has become the “Keep Calm and Carry On” of Trump-era conservatism.

Never forget that Mitch McConnell stole a seat on the Supreme Court from a moderate nominee, Merrick Garland, in order to push a 5-4 doctrinaire majority on the Supreme Court that shifts the judicial ballast toward the mega-wealthy, a shift that could far outlast the horror of the Trump Presidency by decades. This is not just “playing politics,” this is class warfare on a grand scale. The Koch funded Republican chattering class is using specious arguments around the First Amendment to tip the judicial scales back to the 1920s, possibly to the Gilded Age of the late 18th Century. Those focused just on guns and abortion are missing the point.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

 “Conversations with Cathy” are not “conversations.” In a conversation there is back and forth, a chance to hear a talking point and respond by questioning the validity of the point. A conversation is what I had with a Republican friend over a three hour breakfast a couple of weeks ago. I came away with a better understanding of the underlayment for his thoughts and he might have heard enough from me to shift his position a few mental millimeters. 

At the Green Bluff Grange night before last, Tuesday, May 29th, McMorris Rodgers held forth for an hour in front of an audience of about thirty. It turned out I chose a seat next to McMorris Rodgers’ mother. When I asked she told me she had heard of the Town Hall “from an email.” She offered that she wasn’t familiar enough with Facebook to know if it had been posted there. I offered that I had also heard “through an email.” Several of the others if the thirty in the room were paid McMorris Rodgers staff. Even with the very limited advertising, if one were to judge by the questions asked, the audience was divided about half and half between dyed-in-the-wool supporters and detractors. 

Evidence of the limited advertising was not hard to find. One woman I spoke with lives within a mile of the Green Bluff Grange and knows members of the Green Bluff Growers Association (of whom she thought only 4-5 were in attendance). She only heard about the gathering from my email the day of the event. The man sitting next to said he thought he’d seen something in the local community paper. He was very, very impressed that McMorris Rodgers would take time from her important work with President Trump and Paul Ryan to spend some of it with such a tiny crowd in Green Bluff. He later thanked McMorris Rodgers for her vote on H.R. 38, not mentioning it was the “Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act.” (See CMR’s “Courageous Conversations”) Clearly, the NRA (or his church?) was keeping him informed of important developments. 

In a conversation there is quite a lot of back and forth, a chance to challenge background. The crowd was too polite to get beyond niceties of letting her trigger all the mind frames she wanted.

Take the “Balanced Budget Amendment,” for example. At its mere mention there were approving murmurs. One commenter lamented out loud how they’d been working to pass a balanced budget amendment for years. No one, including me, butted in to point out that budgets have two sides, expenditures and income, No one pointed out she had just proudly dropped 1.3 trillion dollars from the income side of the ledger over the next ten years by giving 80% of that money to the already wealthy. No one, including me, probed to see if she had any concept of how a balanced budget amendment would work in the next economic meltdown. (How do you do a stimulus when you have to balance the budget?) No, the approving murmurs went unchallenged. The people of the approving murmurs were highly appreciative of McMorris Rodgers’ vote for a Balanced Budget Amendment even though all of us realize the vote is only symbolic, kept at bay by those evil, misguided Democrats–at least until such time as the forces of good rational capitalism can prevail. (To me this is a wake up call to pay close attention to all those seemingly quixotic votes on abortion, guns, the REINS Act, and many other issues. They may never actually pass–but tilting at these windmills unites the base.)

In short there was no “conversation” around the Balanced Budget Amendment. There was only a nod to a Republican/Libertarian shibboleth.

Net Neutrality? Ah. The regulation as it came from the Obama administration was bad, according to McMorris Rodgers, because it was based on 1930’s law concerning public utilities. “I’m in favor of ‘a law’ against ‘blocking and throttling’ that would apply to ISP’s AND tech companies.” OK. No one asked, including me, if she had put a bill in the hopper. Is this high on her priority list or is she just hoping we’ll forget and let it ride? Forget while the ISPs take up blocking and throttling, warming us slowly like the famous frog in the cook pot. If she tried writing a bill that would regulate anything of financial import her donors would have stroke. Don’t tell us you’re “in favor.” Write a bill, promote it, convince your colleagues, get it passed. 

Climate Change? McMorris Rodgers will not say if she subscribes to the science of climate change. She doesn’t want to be outed as an outright climate denier, but she gives a hint: “The Paris Accords would have wrecked the economy! We’ve already done our bit by improving the fuel efficiency of our cars.” In other words, either she denies the science of climate change or she has given up hope and given up cooperation, preferring a “race to the bottom” in which our children will deal with increasing climate disasters and the rich will build walls to protect their golf courses from the rising sea.

It seems odd she is so sure she can predict the economic future (we must cut entitlements to balance the budget!) and yet she denies the predictions of atmospheric science. The last I checked, atmospheric physics was far more reliably predictive than economics. 

There is more, but I’m out of gas. I hope many will attend today’s 3-4PM pseudo-“Conversation with Cathy” in Pullman. There is a rumor there will be national media in attendance. I hope you will press her for answers to questions I didn’t ask. There is another opportunity in Deer Park on Friday. See the Calendar below for details. 

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

Dear Group,

The “Where’s Cathy?” campaign must not have been good public relations for McMorris Rodgers. Instead of responding with a full scale evening town hall or attending one of several to which she was invited, McMorris Rodgers is now investing our tax dollars in a series she calls “Conversations with Cathy.” They are gatherings offered on short notice, usually in small communities scattered around Congressional District 5. They are held at daytime hours that insure that anyone with an hourly job cannot attend. Laughably, they all come with the admonition, “**Space is limited. This event is first-come, first served**” On May 1 she held a “Town Hall” in Davenport on 24 hours notice on her website. It was hardly a surprise when there were only nineteen in attendance, seven of whom were on government salary and mileage. She could have held her gathering in a walk-in closet.

Watch for her and her handlers to make the claim she “leads the Congress” in holding town halls, in “reaching out to constituents.” 

This week McMorris Rodgers deigns to visit Eastern Washington once again, mostly to attend the Spokane GOP Lincoln Day Dinner and Fundraiser this Saturday, June 2, at the Davenport Grand Hotel. She will justify her visit to the region by racking up her tally of town halls and controlled “conversations.” Predictably, this ad appeared on McMorris Rodgers’ official congressional (not Cathy For Congress) Facebook page last Saturday at 9:41AM (the bold is mine):

Dear Group,

Today we contemplate the lives…and deaths…of those who fell in service to their country. A day to celebrate family, a day to celebrate what it means to be human. It is a day to visit cemeteries and decorate graves in remembrance of those lying in them. 

The origins of the Memorial Day (once known as Decoration Day) stem from a custom of springtime honoring of the dead, but the official U.S. Memorial Day has its roots in the aftermath of and attempts to heal from the Civil War, the last great conflict actually fought on our soil, a conflict that took the lives of more Americans than any other in our country’s short history, one from which we have yet to fully heal, one we would do well to remember–and contemplate.

As you gather for family barbecues take a moment to consider what it took to get these humans, our ancestors, to leave their homes, their family, their children, take up arms and march uphill to their deaths in a hail of lead. Consider those who exhorted them. Consider the preachers who backed them with justification of slavery, using words from a Bible shared with their Northern counterparts, both sides claiming proper literal interpretation. 

Marvel at what humans can be led to sincerely believe…and die for. 

On this Memorial Day, this holiday, this holy-day, take a moment to consider those who have gone before…all of them…and consider what it means to be human.

Back tomorrow.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry