How far was she willing to go?

On the afternoon of January 6, 2021, Cathy McMorris Rodgers denounced the violence of the January 6 insurrection as “unlawful and unacceptable”. Now, a year later, she really wants us to forget her support for the Big Lie that the 2020 election was rife with fraud. It is especially important to McMorris Rodgers that we forget her prior statements and actions now that the details of Trump’s multi-pronged attempted coup are becoming clear, thanks to the House January 6th Committee. It should be no surprise that she, along with a majority of House Republicans, voted against formation of a bi-partisan committee. One must presume she worried over what the investigation might reveal, preferring a largely Democratic committee that could be undermined as a “witch hunt”. 

In December 2020 less than a month before January 6th, 2021, McMorris Rodgers signed on to a “friend of the court” brief in support of a lawsuit brought by Texas’ attorney general Ken Paxton. Paxton brought the suit to challenge the results of the 2020 election in four states, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin. Paxton’s lawsuit was so ill-conceived that even our current uber-conservative Supreme Court refused to hear it. But Paxton’s suit—and McMorris Rodgers’ support of it—served its unvoiced purpose: to bolster suspicion in the public mind that the election was badly flawed, to hint that Trump’s Big Lie that he had won might be true.

On January 5, 2021, McMorris Rodgers declared, “I’m planning to vote to object [to accepting the electoral votes of some states] tomorrow to give voice to millions of Americans that do not have trust and confidence in this election, and to ensure the integrity of our election.” Let’s examine that. That January 5th in Dalton, Georgia, the leader of the Republican Party, Donald Trump, proclaimed once again, falsely, that he had won the election, pushing his Big Lie. In her statement, McMorris Rodgers lent her support, citing claims of election irregularities that were already thoroughly debunked.

On the morning of January 6th, 2021, the Spokesman Review published Shawn Vestal’s scathing assessment of McMorris Rodgers’ plan to vote against accepting the electoral votes of some states. This should have been a pro forma event in the Capitol, an event she proposed to disrupt. Read the whole piece as a reminder of the mindset of that morning, but here’s how it started:

Was there a specific moment that clearly foretold that Cathy McMorris Rodgers would betray her oath of office, the Constitution, and the most basic principle of American democracy in favor of an attempt to lie, cheat and steal an election?

A single moment when we might have foreseen that McMorris Rodgers would burn her boats on the shores of a land ruled by a mad despot, making it impossible to ever credibly return to the ideological ground of democratic values?

Or was this always who she was? A despicable toady. An abject coward. A traitor to her own promises, and an enemy of the American voter.

At the very least, McMorris Rodgers knew long before the morning of January 6 that Trump’s claims of election fraud were false. Either she knew—or she had not done her civic homework. And yet, that morning she was prepared cast her vote to challenge the legitimacy of selected Electoral College votes that had been duly certified by state legislatures. In what more egregious way could she violate the principle of the Constitutional “States’ Rights” she otherwise claims to defend? Even McMorris Rodgers’ two fellow Congressional Republicans, her former mentee Jaime Herrera Beutler (R, SW Washington) and Dan Newhouse (R, Central WA) declined to support this challenge to our Constitutional procedures.

Here is the assessment of Kim Wyman (R, WA Secretary of State at the time) of McMorris Rodgers’ and her fellow insurgents’ plan:

“I think that we are starting to get on really dangerous ground when members of Congress are going to try to thwart the will of the American people and millions of votes that are cast and basically disregard the Electoral College. It’s a state’s right to determine which electors go and represent their voters in the Electoral College, and I would really caution members of our delegation to be thoughtful about the long-term implications of trying to undermine the Electoral College process.”

Later that same day, January 6, 2020, Trump’s mob descended on the Capitol, killing and injuring its defenders and threatening to kill members of Congress and Vice President Pence (who we now know had declined to go along with the plot of Trump’s coup). McMorris Rodgers, apparently shaken by reality, backpedalled, declaring the violence “unlawful and unacceptable” and withdrawing her promise to vote against acceptance of certain states’ electors. 

In keeping with her bland, motherly facade, she sought to backpedal further: “I have been consistent in my belief that Americans should utilize the Constitutional tools and legal processes available to seek answers to their questions about the 2020 election.” Those words sound warm and fuzzy, but the “Constitution tool” she planned to employ against the electoral votes on January 6 and the “legal process” she pursued in the Paxton lawsuit were part of Trump’s plan to breathe life into his Big Lie, divide the country, subvert the will of the voters and seize the presidency, if necessary, by force. She knew—and, if not, she should have known—that both of her actions were anti-democratic aids to an attempted coup. They were in no way an attempt to answer legitimate question about the conduct of the election.

McMorris Rodgers will not lose the support of the rabid wing of the local Republican Party for dancing carefully around this issue, but no one who wishes to uphold our democratic values should be blind to her support of Trump’s Big Lie, a Lie devoted to overturning the result of an election that was clean and fair by any factual measure. 

Keep to the high ground,
Jerry

Inspired by the master?

The Republican Party’s entire platform is Donald Trump’s Big Lie, the false assertion that because of massive election fraud the presidency was stolen from him in the 2020 election. Trump’s Big Lie (and his entire method of leading) sucks the air out of the room. In spite of all evidence to the contrary, more than a year—and more than sixty lost legal contests later—he continues to claim the election was stolen him. He trots out on stage his ministers of propaganda dedicated to keeping the Big Lie alive in the minds of his followers, as he recently did at a rally in Florence, Arizona.

The success of Trump’s Big Lie that seven million votes were stolen from him need not be swallowed whole. Success depends only on instilling doubt: “maybe there’s some truth in what he says; people keep telling me the issue is unsettled; maybe the election procedures in some states really are faulty and need to be fixed.” The Big Lie’s purpose is to keep alive enough worry about election integrity to provide cover for Republican legislators while they consolidate their control over the conduct of elections at the state and local level. Importantly, and currently, the Big Lie also provides cover for the fifty Republican U.S. Senators united in opposition to voting rights, determined to keep the U.S. Congress from using its legitimate Constitutional power to insure voting access in the states. In keeping with Trump’s Big Lie, the Republican Party mantra around voting rights is simple: Any legislation by the Congress to re-instate the Voting Rights Act of 1965, an Act that seventeen of the current Republican Senators previously voted to reauthorize, is now smeared as a “Democrat partisan power grab.”

A “Big Lie” is a falsehood so extreme that it takes over the mind of the believer and, with repetition, makes the believer impervious to facts. The Lie must be so grand, so pervasive, and so often repeated that it becomes the center of thought for a group of people, a group that vehemently rejects dissent and ostracizes all who challenge the Lie. Believers see anyone who does not believe as delusional, their objections worthy only of disregard and derision.

Adolph Hitler described the technique of the Big Lie in his book Mein Kampf. Hitler dictated Mein Kampf while he was in prison for leading an insurrection against the Bavarian government. Four police officers were killed in the fighting, a death toll reminiscent of January 6. In Mein Kampf Hitler described a lie so colossal that it had to be true. It would be taken as true because no one “could [possibly] have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” Hitler claimed that a cabal of Jews were using a Big Lie to blame Germany’s loss in World War I on a German general who was a prominent ally of Hitler’s.

Of course, Hitler and his infamous Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, spoke and wrote of Big Lies put forward by Jews and Englishmen, not of their own Big Lie, the biggest lie of the 20th Century, that a cabal of international Jewry was out to destroy the pure Aryan Race, the Big Lie used to justify the Holocaust. 

A psychological profile of Adolph Hitler written in 1943 by Walter Langer reminds one of a recent one term U.S. President:

“His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”

Did Donald Trump learn the Big Lie strategy from Hitler? There have been rumors that Trump expressed admiration of Hitler’s tactics. David Emery, writing for Snopes in April 2019 and addressing this question concluded:

Questions about what he read or didn’t read aside, we have yet to stumble upon a verifiable instance of Trump expressing respect or admiration for Adolf Hitler. What we did find is that people (including some close to him) have been insinuating that Trump has an affinity for Hitler for the better part of 30 years, which in and of itself is interesting.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

Our Export Makes National News

Christian Nationalism is not a new export from our region. The “Church of Jesus Christ–Christian” at the Aryan Nations compound north of Hayden Lake, Idaho, spread related doctrine from the Inland Northwest throughout the nation for more than three decades. Founded in the 1970s and run by Richard Girnt Butler, the Aryan Nations drew followers from all over the country to the annual “Aryan Nations World Congress”. 

The “World Congress” spun off several members of “The Order,” a group founded in Metalline, Washington, whose members planned and carried out the assassination of Colorado talk show host Alan Berg in 1984. Randy Weaver of the Ruby Ridge standoff attended meetings at the Aryan Nations. Weaver was identified as an inspiration by Timothy McVeigh, the best known of the two plotters of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history. The tendrils of the biblically inspired Phineas Priesthood, followers of which bombed The Spokesman-Review and the Spokane Valley Planned Parenthood in 1996, are toxically entwined with the Aryan Nations. 

The Aryan Nations compound was bulldozed in 2001, the same year the FBI designated the Aryan Nations as “a terrorist threat”. Richard Butler died peacefully in his sleep of congestive heart failure in 2004. At the time Butler was living in a new home in Hayden Lake funded by Sandpoint millionaire and white supremacist Vincent Bertollini. 

The “Church of Jesus Christ–Christian” and the Phineas Priesthood both claimed Bible-based, Christian justification for their ideologies and for the acts of terror and violence carried out by their adherents. 

Surely modern-day Christian Nationalists would disavow Nazism and Aryan Nations-style white supremacy, but the seeds planted over decades by Richard Butler and his Aryan Nations did not fall on barren ground in the northwest or across the nation. The American Redoubt movement that thrives in North Idaho and Matt Shea’s allied and long-nurtured Liberty State are rooted in this same ground. Both movements exude overtones of a religious/ethic enclave free of control by godless government, that is, anyone not devoted their particular brand of nationalistic Christianity. After Matt Shea’s withdrawal from the Washington State legislature on account of exposure of his “Biblical Basis for War” document, Shea became Pastor of the Covenant Church on Spokane’s near north side at 3506 W Princeton Avenue. Covenant’s founder, Ken Peters, “received the call” and went to off to Knoxville to found a “Patriot Church”, leaving Shea in charge. In Peters’ absence Shea decamped from Covenant to a large building at a new location in downtown Spokane at 115 E Pacific Avenue, taking many of Covenant’s parishioners with him. 

Both Shea and Peters are leaders in the local Republican anti-vaccination, anti-mask-mandate, anti-science, pro-gun, anti-abortion, anti-CRT wing. Both are convinced that the United States was founded and the Constitution written by their brand of Christian men and that the U.S. must return to being a totally Christian state. Any suggestion of tolerance for differing views of Christianity, to say nothing of non-Christian believers, is anathema. 

Recently, Pastor Ken Peters, now identified as the pastor of the “Patriot Church” in Knoxville, got national air time on All Things Considered on National Public Radio in an 8 minute segment on Christian Nationalism. I urge you to click this link where you can either listen to the segment online or read the transcript. My ears perked up when I heard Peters’ name on the radio. John Burnett, the NPR interviewer, listens to Peters’ sermon and writes:

…what makes this church different is its embrace of the contemporary agenda of the far right – masks and vaccinations violate religious freedom, the participants in the January 6 riot were proud patriots, the Biden administration is evil and illegitimate.

Peters attended January 6, but said (elsewhere than this interview) that he didn’t enter the Capitol. 

Spokane was never mentioned in the NPR segment, but it mentions that there is a “Patriot Church” in Washington State. I checked and, sure enough, Covenant Church, Peters’ mother church has been re-named “Patriot Church”:

The Covenant Church outpost in Moses Lake, Washington, has also been re-named. 

These are the people who demonstrate outside Planned Parenthood as “The Church at Planned Parenthood,” people who joke about the prevalence of concealed weapons among them, people with ties to Matt Shea, his paramilitary activities, and his breakaway congregation in downtown Spokane. 

Listen to the interview, and, as you do, remember that Peters’ base is right here in Spokane.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

Fiction and Mindset

Over the last two weeks on no less than five occasions people I was talking with spontaneously spontaneously recommended that I watch the recently released science fiction satire “Don’t Look Up”. That is highly unusual, so I did. It did not disappoint. My five friends and acquaintances were a good clue, but that fact that this movie struck a chord far beyond my acquaintanceship came out in a commentary in the New York Times: 

According to Netflix, which self reports its own figures and was the studio behind the film and its distributor, the movie is one of its most popular films ever, amassing an unprecedented 152 million hours viewed in one week.¹

“Don’t Look Up” casts Leonard DeCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence as a pair of frustrated astrophysicists trying to communicate an important discovery. Meryl Streep is cast as the President of the United States. The movie is an insightful, satirical commentary on the interrelation of science, politics, propaganda, and belief systems—but it is worth watching just for the acting. (Note: The movie contains language and implied sex that might not be suitable for children. Besides, the youngest would be bored and older children, unaware of satire, might have nightmares.)

The movie is free to stream on Netflix. If you’re not a subscriber it is worth the $8.99 plus tax for one month of a Basic subscription just to see this one movie. (What would you pay in a theater?)²

Do not discount the influence of fiction on the mindset and value systems of the viewer or reader. The New York Times article reminded me of that:

Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted that it seemed like a documentary. Several admirers likened the film to “A Modest Proposal,” the 18th-century satirical essay by Jonathan Swift.

Indeed, works of fiction and story-telling non-fiction like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, To Kill a Mockingbird, Catch 22, Hiroshima, Dr. Stranglove, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, to name just a few, have all had profound effects on attitudes toward slavery, war, atomic weapons, and psychiatric confinement—and those attitudes seep into politics and voting. Fiction or true story, we humans tend to internalize and often adopt that to which we are exposed in print and on our many screens. (Watch “The Brain Washing of My Dad” free on YouTube for a clear illustration.)³

Satire, when properly deployed, can be a great stimulant to thought. “Don’t Look Up” is terrific example such satire. Watch it and spread the word. (Be sure to watch through the credits. There is a short, entertaining bonus at the very end.)

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry1

For perspective, those 152 million hours of viewing imply that “Don’t Look Up” appeared on a screen in front of one or more Netflix watchers more than 67 million times (divide by 2.25 hours, the duration of the movie). If there were an average of just 1.6 people watching each of those screens that would imply that a third of the population of the United States watched this movie—in one week! This movie is cultural phenomenon and reference thought ought not be missed.2

There might be a freebie month offered if you’re new to Netflix. Of course, the trick with all this is to remind yourself to cancel if you’re not going to use the subscription later. Ignored subscriptions are financial death by a thousand cuts. 3

It should come as no surprise that many conservatives demonize most of the Hollywood movie industry as “out of touch liberal elites” or that Republicans in a number of states are passing laws under the guise of “anti-CRT”, laws that can be used to keep books like “To Kill a Mockingbird” out of public school classrooms. Nor should it come as a surprise that extreme Christian Fundamentalists decry the Harry Potter books and movies as paganism and the work of the Devil.

A local Panel on our political divisions–and homelessness

This coming Wednesday, January 19th, between 5 and 7PM, EWU and “Spokane Talks” will present a livestreamed panel discussion entitled “Beyond Politics: Starting the Discussion”. I expect an interesting presentationn. Two topics will be addressed: The polluted information environment that contributes to our political division—and the issue of homelessness. 

Jim Wavada, a friend of mine and one of the two panel hosts, presents all the background detail for how this panel came about in the quote at the foot of this email. I find the background very interesting—but it is probably not essential to getting something out of the panel. Seeing a variety of local political figures having a civilized bi-partisan discussion about two topics of local and national interest and importance ought to be educational.

As Jim explains below, if you want to want to submit a question to the panel you will need to connect with the livestream. That livestream should be available on the Facebook page of KHQ or the Facebook page of Spokane Talks (recommended—the lead-in is already posted there). If you find Facebook as frustrating as I do (or if you don’t have an account and don’t want one at Facebook) and you don’t need to ask a question, I think YouTube.com will work just as well. I did not need to sign in to an account at YouTube.com to search for “Spokane Talks”. There I believe the “Beyond Politics will appear on January 19 at 5PM. If you go there now you can watch the recording of a livestream entitled “A Conversation with Breean Beggs”, the President of the City of Spokane City Council, discussing city government and homelessness. The first five or ten minutes offers a civics lesson and background you might find useful preparatory to Wednesday’s livestream of Beyond Politics. 

Set up a reminder in your calendar for Wednesday, January 19, at 5PM.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

From Jim Wavada:

I want to encourage you all to tune into a community forum/panel discussion this coming Wednesday, Jan. 19th being live streamed on the KHQ facebook page, at spokanetalksmedia.com’s facebook page and on YouTube from 5:00 – 7:00 PM.

I’m Jim Wavada, local Democrat, frequent “corrector of Sue Lani Madsen’s missives” in the Spokesman-Review, and author of the yet to be adopted Spokane County Democratic 2021 platform update. 

I will be co-hosting “Beyond Politics: Starting the Discussion” with Spokane’s beloved conservative voice, Spokesman-Review weekly columnist, author, architect, EMT, and goat rancher Sue Lani Madsen. One wonders how she finds the time!

This was not Sue Lani’s nor my idea. The panel is the inspiration of Spokane businessman and Iranian immigrant Mike Gahvarehchee, who told us his mantra is that we can tackle any big problems if we just unite around solving them long enough to get it done.  But Mike took this idea to J. Kent Adams, who took it to Sue Lani Madsen, and she reached out to me to co-host it with her because of our frequent civilized jousts over just about everything. I liked this concept right away when she emailed me about it with the invitation to co-host.

Per Sue Lani’s suggestion, we have each recruited a panel of a half dozen people each whom we believe can speak to the conservative or liberal points of view in Spokane County. The format is a little like the old McLaughlin Group program we loved to watch back in the day. Ms. Madsen and I will open the discussion with a question to the panelists assembled with us at EWU-Spokane’s Catalyst Building.   We will then mediate a discussion of their respective answers with an eye toward identifying signs of shared values and interests, not just positions. Both of us swear we will NOT adopt McLaughlin’s rude trademark interruptions of “Wrong!” We promise. But you get the idea.

This is a forum where it will be okay to disagree agreeably. We don’t anticipate any hallelujah moments or miracle conversions; but we do hope to demonstrate that we can still discuss how we can possibly work together to solve real problems. We hope this will be the first of several such community discussion we moderate.

In this inaugural forum, we will first address the polluted information environment that seems to have led to our increasingly conflicting understandings of our shared history and working realities today. As we have seen from the pandemic, some realities don’t care about which narrative we have decided to believe. The virus doesn’t care about your political leanings. It will make you sick or kill you either way. Homelessness isn’t an exclusively Republican or Democratic tragedy. It’s everyone’s problem. We all own it. We’ll talk about how we can break through these manufactured narratives that constrain our thinking and perception that for the first hour.

In the second hour, we will talk about one of those immutable realities in Spokane, homelessness. We will attempt to apply what we learn in the first session to an open discussion of homelessness as a real problem that will require us to tear down the political battlements at least long enough to take a serious look at how we can apply our humanity and compassion to such a tragic and stubborn challenge.

We don’t expect to solve the problem, no way; but maybe we can reach some agreement that there is no single, best solution and that we need to work together to address this issue.

To give you an idea what to expect, I have recruited the following panelists: State Senator Andy Billig, State Rep. Marcus Riccelli both video-calling in from Olympia to participate in the second session on homelessness; along with those from the first session, including Spokane City Council President Breean Beggs; Pastor Andy Castro Lang of Westminster Congregationalist Church; Yvette Joseph, Colville Confederated Tribes and State Committeewoman, Spokane County Democrats; and retired legislator and local lawyer Dennis Dellwo.

I’m not sure who Madsen has actually confirmed to this point; but I believe she will have State Sen. Jeff Holy; Chris Cargill, Washington Policy Center; Pam Haley, mayor of City of Spokane Valley; Phillip Tyler, former Spokane County NAACP president; and Craig Meidl, Spokane Police Chief.

As you can see, it’s an interesting contrast of political leanings, and a whole lot of bright and articulate people, so it should be an interesting dicussion.

Mr. Gahvarehchee is paying the bills for this production, for the technicians who put this together onsite at the net zero energy Catalyst Building, to the equipment rental or purchases needed to the appetizers and coffee that will keep us going.   EWU is our host at the Catalyst Building. Somewhat infamous local conservative J. Kent Adams, owner of Spokane Talks Media, an open, for-rent streaming service, is providing the technology that will live stream this session. 

Oh, I almost forgot. If you tune in through one of the two Facebook sites, you will be able to submit questions and comments. With such a large panel of “articulate” leaders on set, I can’t promise your questions will actually be addressed during the session; but we will try to get to as many of them as we can.

So please come join us, Wednesday night, 5:00 PM streaming on https://www.facebook.com/spokanetalksmedia/ or KHQ’s Facebook page. If you just want to watch and don’t want to comment, I understand it is available on YouTube’s live stream as well. [see above]

Homelessness, Developers, and Election Propaganda

For two years Nadine Woodward has led the mayor’s office of the City of Spokane. Ms. Woodward came to the 2019 election from a long career as the familiar face and voice of local television news, projecting what is arguably an illusion of knowledge and management competence. Even as a public personality in the November 2019 general election Ms. Woodward beat former City Council President Ben Stuckart by a margin of just 848 votes, out of nearly 70,000 votes cast, 50.32 to 49.08%. 

Ms. Woodward’s and Mr. Stuckart’s campaigns each raised and spent close to $300,000 on the electoral contests, but local developer and realtor Political Action Committees (PACs) contributed another $330,000 in “independent expenditures” in support of Ms. Woodward.

Early on Ms. Woodward set the theme by posting a link to an inflammatory video entitled “Seattle is Dying”, a polemic “KOMO News Documentary” that presents Seattle as a city strewn with homeless camps with a mentally disturbed addict acting up on every corner. The video blames “liberal” Seattle government for this video-presented tragedy. The implication of the posting was that candidate Woodward would keep Spokane from descending into the same fate. 

Beyond the registered PACs funded by realtors and developers wanting control of the mayor’s office, wealthy local developer Larry B. Stone spent tens of thousands of dollars putting together a documentary video one might describe as the lite version of “Seattle is Dying”. “Curing Spokane” carefully avoids any mention of either candidate or the upcoming mayoral general election in 2019. Posted two and a half months ahead of the November general election, it spends 17 minutes discussing crime while depicting homeless camps and mentally disturbed people acting out on city streets. “Curing Spokane” details how Spokane and Boise, Idaho, are extremely similar, but portrays Boise as much clearer and safer. Boise is noted to have a higher jail capacity and half the homeless population of Spokane, implying the two are related. Mr. Stone’s video than presents “solutions”: a new, bigger jail, more cops on the streets, and, somewhat bizarrely, the development of more downtown parking and, lastly, putting the bus station underground. In a separate news video Mr. Stone is seen declaring that he is “neutral” regarding the mayoral candidates and that both candidates “really care”. The interviewer adds that Mr. Stone is not endorsing either candidate. 

Even so, it is impossible to miss that Ms. Woodward’s campaign leaned hard on promoting an increase in police presence downtown, proposed moving the location of the downtown police station, and supported building a new, bigger jail, all implying Ms. Woodward would offer Spokane the suggested “Cure”. A few weeks after Ms. Woodward won election as mayor by her slim majoritythe Spokesman quietly reported that Larry Stone’s L. B. Stone Properties was “seeking $1.2 million in tax exemptions [from the City of Spokane] for a major high-rise project on the north bank of the Spokane River”. The article further notes that the same L.B. Stone high-rise project “has already been approved for $300,000 in city money through the “Projects of Citywide Significance” program. Some might consider that tax break and grant a good return on investment for a few tens of thousands of dollars spent on making and spreading “Curing Spokane” while carefully couching the video as a non-political position statement.

Is Spokane “Cured”? Hardly. Mayor Woodward’s administration has for two years now seemed to wake up in late October to the idea that winter is coming, that increasing numbers of people have been made homeless by loss of jobs and rising rents. Ms. Woodward and her administration hurriedly opened, at great expense, a warming shelter at the Convention Center during a recent cold snap expecting 150 people. Then the administration seemed surprised when more than 300 people showed up, giving the lie to the city’s contention that a few scattered empty shelter beds counted elsewhere in the city were proof that everyone who needed a bed had one available to them. Then, in direct violation of the City of Spokane’s own ordinances, on a 19 degree Sunday morning, the City closed that Convention Center shelter and turned people out into the cold. A friend of mine who saw the spectacle said “I am ashamed of my city” as people shuffled out the Convention Center and out to the streets. The next day there were reports of police, presumably ordered to do so by the mayor’s office, clearing tents and belonging of these same people from under downtown overpasses. 

Admittedly, there has been a lot going on the past two years to keep the mayor occupied, but the problems of crime and homelessness are worse, not better. We can thank big money and propaganda from the realtor and developer community for a mayor’s office run by a television newscaster. The alternative was a man with administrative experience who understands the intertwining problems of homelessness, addiction, and mental illness. We need a mayor’s office that understands that winter comes every year, that a few open shelter beds around the city doesn’t mean that no one is homeless, and that doesn’t think that directing the police to clear the encampments of people with no place to go is a humane solution. 

Does the citizenry need to sue the mayor’s office to encourage it to comply with city ordinances?

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

It’s not what you were taught in School

I was taught in school that the Civil War was not fought over slavery, that the Emancipation Proclamation and the abolition of slavery came as something of an afterthought to a dispute over “States’ Rights,” the tension between the authority of the individual states and the authority of the federal government, a tension that had existed even before the time of the ratification of the Constitution, a tension expressed, in part, by the political movement of Anti-Federalism.

The South lost the Civil War and, with it, you would think, not only the institution of enslavement based on race, but You would also think they lost much of the argument over “States’ Rights”. In the years following Richard Nixon’s adoption of the “Southern Strategy”, the modern Republican Party has taken up the cause of “States’ Rights” in a modified form: through a concerted campaign to stoke distrust in the workings of the federal government. It crops up in many forms. Locally elected “Constitutional Sheriffs” in some jurisdictions (think Richard Mack and Joe Arpaio in Arizona, but also Daryl Wheeler in Bonner County, North Idaho), all far right Republicans, claim their authority supersedes the federal government’s (and, in some cases, even the state government).

Such antagonism and distrust of the federal government cropped up recently in a surreal article appearing in the Bonner County Daily Bee describing a meeting of the County Commissioners (all far right Republicans). At the meeting there was contention over whether federal funds from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 were being accepted clandestinely by the Commissioners for use in Bonner County. It sounded as though both the Commissioners and those testifying from the audience agreed:

…that spending the federal money would cause smaller government entities to adhere to potential future executive orders about pandemic response actions.

The argument was over whether the Commissioners were by some sort of financial sleight of hand were actually using some of the federal money while claiming they were not. The surreal part of this that the money in question comes from federal income taxes paid, in part, by the citizens of Bonner County, the same people who will be asked to fill the gap in the county budget left by non-acceptance of ARPA funds—an inane expression of the doctrine of “States’ Rights”: “We can’t accept a federal grant of our own money because it might, arguably, come with some strings attached.”

There is a much more than a tinge of “States’ Rights” in some Spokane County Republicans (see former state Rep. Matt Shea, for example) promotion of Liberty State and in the concept of The American Redoubt. What point is there, after all, in establishing a new government if that government can’t enact laws independent of federal oversight?

From where does this need to assert “States’ Rights” to operate independent of federal oversight come from? I’ve copied and pasted below Professor Heather Cox Richardson’s post from January 7 for those of you who are not yet subscribed to her daily email Letters from an American. HCR’s post lifted the blinders I received in high school, blinders provided by decades of “Lost Cause” ideology. (I recommend an excellent documentary, The Neutral Ground, for rent on Youtube for $3.99 for further explanation of the “Lost Cause”.) I do not believe that all modern-day Republicans understand the origins of these concepts, but the far right upon which Republicans increasingly depend certainly do—I cannot get the image of a full size flag, the Confederate Stars and Bars, carried proudly through the U.S. Capitol on January 6. It isn’t just that the “South will rise again” with all it stood for. The South has, in fact, risen, but in veiled form and over decades of effort.

Keep the the high ground,
Jerry

January 7, 2022

Heather Cox Richardson Jan 8

Today, Judge Timothy Walmsley sentenced the three men convicted of murdering 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery on February 23, 2020, as he jogged through a primarily white neighborhood in Brunswick, Georgia. Travis McMichael, his father Gregory McMichael, and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan chased Arbery in their trucks, cornering him on a suburban street. Travis McMichael shot and killed the unarmed Arbery, while Bryan filmed the encounter from inside his truck.

While the men were convicted of several different crimes, all three were convicted of felony murder or of committing felonies that led to Arbery’s death. Under Georgia law, they each faced life in prison, but the judge could determine whether they could be paroled. Judge Walmsley denied the possibility of parole for the McMichael father and son, but allowed it for Bryan. Under Georgia law, that means he will be eligible for parole after 30 years.

The state of Georgia came perilously close to ignoring the crimes that now have the McMichaels and Bryan serving life sentences.

Gregory McMichael was connected to the first two district attorneys in charge of the case, both of whom ultimately recused themselves, but not until they told law enforcement that Georgia’s citizens arrest law, dating from an 1863 law designed to permit white men to hunt down Black people escaping enslavement, enabled the men to chase Arbery and that they had shot him in self-defense. In late April, the state’s attorney general appointed a third district attorney to the investigation. “We don’t know anything about the case,” the new district attorney told reporters. “We don’t have any preconceived idea about it.”

On April 26, pressure from Arbery’s family and the community had kicked up enough dust that the New York Times reported on the case, noting that there had been no arrests. Eager to clear his name, and apparently thinking that anyone who saw the video of the shooting would believe, as the local district attorneys had, that it justified the shooting, on May 6 Gregory McMichael arranged for his lawyer to take the video to a local radio station, which uploaded it for public viewing.

The station took the video down two hours later, but not before a public outcry brought outside oversight. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation took over the case, and two days later, on May 7, GBI officers arrested the McMichaels. On May 11, the case was transferred to Atlanta, about 270 miles away from Brunswick. On May 21, 2020, officers arrested Bryan.

On Wednesday, November 24, a jury found the three men guilty of a range of crimes on the same day that the first district attorney turned herself in to officials after a grand jury indicted her for violating her oath of office and obstructing police, saying she used her position to discourage law enforcement officers from arresting the McMichaels.

The Arbery case echoes long historical themes. Arbery was a Black man, executed by white men who saw an unarmed jogger as a potential criminal and believed they had a right to arrest him. But it is also a story of local government and outsiders, and which are best suited to protect democracy.

From the nation’s early years, lawmakers who wanted to protect their own interests have insisted that true American democracy is local, where voters can make their wishes clearly known. They said that the federal government must not intervene in the choices state voters made about the way their government operated despite the fact that the federal government represents the will of the vast majority of Americans. Federal intervention in state laws, they said, was tyranny.

But those lawmakers shaped the state laws to their own interests by limiting the vote. They actually developed and deployed their argument primarily to protect the institution of human enslavement (although it was used later to promote big business). If state voters—almost all white men who owned at least some property—wanted to enslave their Black neighbors, the reasoning went, the federal government had no say in the matter despite representing the vast majority of the American people.

After the Civil War, the federal government stepped in to enable Black men to protect their equality before the law by guaranteeing their right to vote in the states. But it soon abandoned the effort and let the South revert to a one-party system in which who you knew and what you looked like mattered far more than the law.

After World War II, returning veterans, civil rights lawyers, and grassroots organizers set out to register Black and Brown people to vote in their home states and got beaten and murdered for their efforts. So in 1965, Congress stepped in, passing the Voting Rights Act.

It took only about 20 years for states once again to begin cutting back on voting rights. Then, in 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, and states promptly began to make it harder to vote. Since the 2020 election, 19 Republican-dominated states have made it even harder. Many of those states are now functionally one-party states, in which equality before the law matters less than belonging to the dominant group.

Now, once again, right-wing leaders are trying to center our government on the states. Today, the Supreme Court heard arguments about the Biden administration’s vaccine or testing requirement for businesses that have more than 100 employees. (Ironically, two of the lawyers arguing against the mandate had to appear virtually because they had tested positive for Covid and the Supreme Court protocols prohibited them from the court.)

A majority of the justices indicated they thought such a mandate was government overreach. Knowing that Republicans in the Senate would never permit similar legislation, Chief Justice John Roberts said that the pandemic “sounds like the sort of thing that states will be responding to or should be, and that Congress should be responding to or should be, rather than agency by agency the federal government and the executive branch acting alone.”

But states that are restricting the vote almost certainly will not respond to the pandemic in a way that represents the will of the majority, and Republicans are trying to guarantee that the federal government cannot protect voting. Just last Tuesday, January 4, 2022, Republican senators reiterated their opposition to the Democrats’ Freedom to Vote Act.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told reporters that there was no need for federal election protections because states would never overturn the counting of votes after an election (although a number of state legislators tried to do just that in 2020). “The notion that some state legislature would be crazy enough to say to their own voters, ‘We’re not going to honor the results of the election’ is ridiculous on its face,” he said. Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) said that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) “is using the false narrative that our states cannot protect voters’ access to voting.”

They can, of course. The problem is that historically, many of them do the opposite. And the minority rule that results not only results in poor governance, it leads to the sort of society in which three men can hunt down and shoot an unarmed jogger and, unless outsiders happen to step in, run a good chance of getting away with it.

—

Notes:

I outlined the events of the Arbery killing on November 26, 2001.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/01/07/ahmaud-arbery-murder-sentencing/

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/nothing-to-see-here-mcconnell-claims-state-legislatures-would-never-overturn-elections

https://www.c-span.org/video/?517020-1/senate-republican-leaders-hold-news-conference

https://www.npr.org/2021/10/26/1048398618/what-is-the-citizens-arrest-law-in-the-trial-over-ahmaud-arberys-death

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