Leader or follower?

The opinion piece copied and pasted below appeared in the Sunday, December 19, Spokesman. Shawn Vestal contrasts U.S. Rep. McMorris Rodgers (R-Eastern Washington, WA Congressional District 5 for sixteen years) with U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY). The two have in common that they served successively as the chairperson of the House Republican Conference, “the primary forum for communicating the party’s message to members.” The chair of the House Republican Conference is to communicate, not craft, the party message. It is a position for a follower, not a leader. As a follower (and one of a handful of Republican women serving in the House), McMorris Rodgers served as chair for six years (three Congresses), the longest tenure for anyone, male or female, in three decades. On January 3, 2019, McMorris Rodgers was voted out as chair and returned to the position of a rank and file House Republican, stripped of putative leadership credentials. She was replaced by Rep. Liz Cheney. When Cheney denounced the January 6 insurrection her independence from the Republican message machine was not tolerated. Part way into her second term as chair Cheney was replaced by the more pliable, three term Republican Representative from New York, Elise Stefanik, a vocal supporter of Mr. Trump on May 14, 2021. The job of communicating the message of the Trump Party is once again in the hands of a follower and sycophant. 

Vestal’s coverage of the contrast between Cheney and McMorris Rodgers is spot on.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

Shawn Vestal: The anti-Rodgers pays the cost of courage in modern GOP

Ever since Liz Cheney outmaneuvered Cathy McMorris Rodgers for her spot in House leadership a few years back, the Wyoming Republican has served as a kind of opposite number to the congressional representation we have here.

Where Cheney zigs, Rodgers zags. Cheney shows courage; Rodgers displays cowardice. Cheney puts principle over party; Rodgers puts party over everything. Cheney tells obvious truths; Rodgers lavishes praise on the emperor’s new duds.

Cheney is spending every bit of her political capital to root out the facts about Jan. 6; Rodgers is voting in lockstep with Team Amnesia.

They are the yin and yang of GOP politics. And because of the sorry state of those politics, the brave one is in exile, and the coward is perfectly secure.

Last week brought another example.

As the House select committee circled the coup-plotting former president’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, it was Cheney’s straightforward, unvarnished voice bringing forth the evidence that Trump was begged repeatedly to call off the dogs while the Capitol was being stormed – begged by people who have since publicly minimized and lied about Jan. 6.

Cheney, facing another barrage of criticism and insults from her own team, delivered the plain truth on the House floor.

“All of my colleagues, all of them, knew that what happened on Jan. 6 was an assault on our Constitution,” she said. “They knew it at the time. Yet now they are defending the indefensible. Whether we tell the truth, get to the truth, and defend ourselves against it ever happening again is the moral test of our time. How we address Jan. 6 is the moral test of our time.”

Rodgers was busily meeting this moral challenge by tweeting about “#Bidenflation” and voting in lockstep against charging Meadows with contempt of Congress.

This was only to be expected. Rodgers, though she is a minor figure in the revisionist army, has loyally propped up the lies that brought us here, both directly and indirectly – lies that fueled Jan. 6 and lies that have been deployed ever since to minimize what happened and obstruct accountability.

The Trump era has put most GOP lawmakers – the ones who are not out-and-out nuts – into a tight corner: go along or sacrifice yourself on principle. A year ago, as Trump was cooking up plans to undermine the election and the corner was getting very tight indeed, these two representatives set out on very different paths.

The Supreme Court had just batted away an effort by Team Trump to have legitimate votes thrown out and to allow state legislatures to replace the will of the voters with a victory for Trump. Rodgers and 125 other members of Congress signed on to this reprehensible effort.

She also peddled clear, knowably false nonsense about the Pennsylvania elections. She planned to vote against the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory, a vote based on these lies. She did not waver in this stance even after the release of Trump’s phone call to Georgia elections officials made clear what kind of slimy mafioso tactics she was supporting.

Only after insurrectionists broke into the Capitol did she seem to wake up to what she and her fellow travelers had wrought. Being scared for your life will do that. She was described later as sitting outside the Capitol, tearfully texting that she was afraid for her country.

She showed a brief moment of clarity after that, when she reversed course and voted to certify the election after all. This has been described by more than one of her sycophants as “courageous.”

Courage ain’t what it used to be in the GOP, I guess. Fortunately, there is an actual instance of courage in the House, one that has stood higher and higher as Rodgers dried her tears and got over her concern for the country. Along the way, she’s done a lot of predictable shovel work for the party, carrying out the attack of the day against Biden with all the originality and verve that she’s come to be known for.

Meanwhile, Cheney was calling on her fellow representatives to stop lying about the election and give up on their unconstitutional plans to overturn the vote. As the Jan. 6 riot was unfolding, she angrily – and correctly – told Rep. Jim Jordan: “You … did this.”

She voted to impeach, and she has been among the very, very few in her party whose concern over Jan. 6 didn’t evaporate by Jan. 8.

Last week, she again vaulted in moral stature – while plummeting in party stature – as she read the damning texts that showed lawmakers and Fox News barkers literally pleading with the president to act while the rioters raged. The president, as everyone knows, did nothing for hours then told the rioters he loved them.

In ordinary times, what Cheney is doing would not be extraordinary. It might simply show that she’s a sentient being – able to identify and discern facts, unwilling to tell blatant falsehoods, and serious about her oath to the Constitution.

In these times, however, that makes her all but heroic. But you can’t tell the truth in today’s GOP, which is why Cheney is doomed and Rodgers is just fine.

The opinion piece copied and pasted below appeared in the Sunday, December 19, Spokesman. Shawn Vestal contrasts U.S. Rep. McMorris Rodgers (R-Eastern Washington, WA Congressional District 5 for sixteen years) with U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY). The two have in common that they served successively as the chairperson of the House Republican Conference, “the primary forum for communicating the party’s message to members.” The chair of the House Republican Conference is to communicate, not craft, the party message. It is a position for a follower, not a leader. As a follower (and one of a handful of Republican women serving in the House), McMorris Rodgers served as chair for six years (three Congresses), the longest tenure for anyone, male or female, in three decades. On January 3, 2019, McMorris Rodgers was voted out as chair and returned to the position of a rank and file House Republican, stripped of putative leadership credentials. She was replaced by Rep. Liz Cheney. When Cheney denounced the January 6 insurrection her independence from the Republican message machine was not tolerated. Part way into her second term as chair Cheney was replaced by the more pliable, three term Republican Representative from New York, Elise Stefanik, a vocal supporter of Mr. Trump on May 14, 2021. The job of communicating the message of the Trump Party is once again in the hands of a follower and sycophant. 

Vestal’s coverage of the contrast between Cheney and McMorris Rodgers is spot on.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

Shawn Vestal: The anti-Rodgers pays the cost of courage in modern GOP

Ever since Liz Cheney outmaneuvered Cathy McMorris Rodgers for her spot in House leadership a few years back, the Wyoming Republican has served as a kind of opposite number to the congressional representation we have here.

Where Cheney zigs, Rodgers zags. Cheney shows courage; Rodgers displays cowardice. Cheney puts principle over party; Rodgers puts party over everything. Cheney tells obvious truths; Rodgers lavishes praise on the emperor’s new duds.

Cheney is spending every bit of her political capital to root out the facts about Jan. 6; Rodgers is voting in lockstep with Team Amnesia.

They are the yin and yang of GOP politics. And because of the sorry state of those politics, the brave one is in exile, and the coward is perfectly secure.

Last week brought another example.

As the House select committee circled the coup-plotting former president’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, it was Cheney’s straightforward, unvarnished voice bringing forth the evidence that Trump was begged repeatedly to call off the dogs while the Capitol was being stormed – begged by people who have since publicly minimized and lied about Jan. 6.

Cheney, facing another barrage of criticism and insults from her own team, delivered the plain truth on the House floor.

“All of my colleagues, all of them, knew that what happened on Jan. 6 was an assault on our Constitution,” she said. “They knew it at the time. Yet now they are defending the indefensible. Whether we tell the truth, get to the truth, and defend ourselves against it ever happening again is the moral test of our time. How we address Jan. 6 is the moral test of our time.”

Rodgers was busily meeting this moral challenge by tweeting about “#Bidenflation” and voting in lockstep against charging Meadows with contempt of Congress.

This was only to be expected. Rodgers, though she is a minor figure in the revisionist army, has loyally propped up the lies that brought us here, both directly and indirectly – lies that fueled Jan. 6 and lies that have been deployed ever since to minimize what happened and obstruct accountability.

The Trump era has put most GOP lawmakers – the ones who are not out-and-out nuts – into a tight corner: go along or sacrifice yourself on principle. A year ago, as Trump was cooking up plans to undermine the election and the corner was getting very tight indeed, these two representatives set out on very different paths.

The Supreme Court had just batted away an effort by Team Trump to have legitimate votes thrown out and to allow state legislatures to replace the will of the voters with a victory for Trump. Rodgers and 125 other members of Congress signed on to this reprehensible effort.

She also peddled clear, knowably false nonsense about the Pennsylvania elections. She planned to vote against the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory, a vote based on these lies. She did not waver in this stance even after the release of Trump’s phone call to Georgia elections officials made clear what kind of slimy mafioso tactics she was supporting.

Only after insurrectionists broke into the Capitol did she seem to wake up to what she and her fellow travelers had wrought. Being scared for your life will do that. She was described later as sitting outside the Capitol, tearfully texting that she was afraid for her country.

She showed a brief moment of clarity after that, when she reversed course and voted to certify the election after all. This has been described by more than one of her sycophants as “courageous.”

Courage ain’t what it used to be in the GOP, I guess. Fortunately, there is an actual instance of courage in the House, one that has stood higher and higher as Rodgers dried her tears and got over her concern for the country. Along the way, she’s done a lot of predictable shovel work for the party, carrying out the attack of the day against Biden with all the originality and verve that she’s come to be known for.

Meanwhile, Cheney was calling on her fellow representatives to stop lying about the election and give up on their unconstitutional plans to overturn the vote. As the Jan. 6 riot was unfolding, she angrily – and correctly – told Rep. Jim Jordan: “You … did this.”

She voted to impeach, and she has been among the very, very few in her party whose concern over Jan. 6 didn’t evaporate by Jan. 8.

Last week, she again vaulted in moral stature – while plummeting in party stature – as she read the damning texts that showed lawmakers and Fox News barkers literally pleading with the president to act while the rioters raged. The president, as everyone knows, did nothing for hours then told the rioters he loved them.

In ordinary times, what Cheney is doing would not be extraordinary. It might simply show that she’s a sentient being – able to identify and discern facts, unwilling to tell blatant falsehoods, and serious about her oath to the Constitution.

In these times, however, that makes her all but heroic. But you can’t tell the truth in today’s GOP, which is why Cheney is doomed and Rodgers is just fine.

Time to Rethink this

The article I’ve copied and pasted below appeared in The Inlander. It is dated December 16. A friend texted me the link on Christmas Day. I feel the article is worth sharing, especially as I read of comments made by Senator Joe Manchin (DINO, WV), a man living on his yacht, suggesting that the recipients of some of the benefits contained in the Build Back Better Act would “just spend the money on drugs”. Yesterday, I heard from someone driving on I-90 who noted the homeless encampment on the cleared land on the north side of freeway, people with no place to go—just as temperatures are predicted below zero. What is wrong with us?

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

Like the good book says, this Christmas let’s resolve to lift up the lowly and fill the hungry with good things

By Tara Roberts

Helping the young, poor and pregnant has some precedent.

The Christmas Eve I was 25 years old, I knelt by the couch, prying Matchbox cars out of their packaging and stuffing them into my almost-2-year-old son’s stocking. On the ratty carpet of our tiny rental house, my husband set up a figure-eight of wooden train tracks, right where H would see them when he woke up.

Earlier that night, after tucking H into his crib, I’d driven across town to the lone open grocery store to buy a test. It was just a precaution. Just a little heartburn, a little stomach ache. I was definitely overreacting.

But, sitting at a stoplight halfway to the store, I realized I had no doubt what the test would say.

We were young, a grad student and a security guard, still reeling from the Great Recession, sitting on a pile of student loans, raising a toddler with the help of family and friends. No formal child care. No sick leave. Bare-bones medical insurance.

H was a planned baby, in the way two idealistic 20-somethings make life-rewriting plans without really knowing what they’re getting into. I was a newspaper reporter when he was born, and I wrote a piece about how grateful I was that Medicaid saved us when I had complications early in my pregnancy that wiped out our savings. People — not strangers, but people I’d interviewed, people I knew — wrote to declare I did not deserve to have a child if I couldn’t pay for it.

And now I was poor and pregnant again.

We’d fretted over the cost of that train set. Bought H the $15 Buzz Lightyear action figure instead of the big one he’d admired in the store, with its working buttons and lights. Topped his stocking off with socks and a toothbrush, because he needed them anyway.

I remember thinking about a certain filthy rich reality TV star. I’d read in a magazine about a gift he’d bought his wife, some piece of extravagant jewelry that cost several times more than my family lived on in a year.

And I was angry, furious, knowing how some people would look at the rich man’s gift compared to the beautiful, terrifying, unexpected one I got that Christmas Eve. I knew who they’d think was worthy, and who wasn’t.

Every Christmas season, all those feelings come back. During Advent at my church, we sing “The Magnificat” — the verses from the book of Luke where Mary sings in celebration of the impending birth of Jesus.

Mary was young, poor, socially compromised, facing the mother of all unplanned pregnancies. She wasn’t feeling too warm about rich people in her time, either.

(God) has brought down the powerful from their thrones,

and lifted up the lowly;

he has filled the hungry with good things,

and sent the rich away empty.

For Mary, my 25-year-old self and everyone for whom the holiday has ever been as much about fear as joy, I’d like to suggest we honor this ancient Christmas message.

Let’s tax the hell out of the rich. Redistribute some unholy wealth. Do God’s work of bringing down the powerful from their superyachts and obscenely shaped spaceships and golden thrones (of various types) and making them fund a few good things for the rest of us.

We wouldn’t even have to send them away completely empty. Just skim enough off the top of American billionaires’ $1.2 trillion of shiny new net worth added in just the past year to help pay for a few extravagant gifts like funding parental leave, or ensuring fair wages for teachers and nurses and grocery store workers, or making sure every person has a safe place to live and enough to eat, or making sure no one goes broke trying to pay for cancer treatment or insulin or a new baby.

I know it’s a lot to ask when there are private islands and enormous diamonds to be had, but I feel like we could make it work.

Mary was young, poor, socially compromised, facing the mother of all unplanned pregnancies. She wasn’t feeling too warm about rich people.

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Of course I don’t know how to make it work. My mighty columnist powers have yet to give me nuanced insight into capital gains taxes and IRS loopholes — but they do give me a platform to call on the plenty of qualified people out there who can figure it out. I want to hear their plans, I want to vote for the people who support them, and I want the people I vote for to be brave enough to try it out.

Is all this radical, idealistic, blindly optimistic, and disregarding of arguments about capitalism and liberty and bootstraps? Sure is.

Indulge me in my wild ideas. Indulge yourself, if you want the same. Make it a prayer and a song; dig in to that feeling of ludicrous hope. Believe in the seemingly impossible. It’s Christmas. ♦

Tara Roberts is a writer and college journalism adviser who lives in Moscow with her husband, sons and poodle. Her work has appeared in Moss, Hippocampus and a variety of regional publications. Follow her on Twitter @tarabethidaho.

A Poem for Christmas

I’m taking a break from writing this Christmas Eve, but I just heard this read on Spokane Public Radio and I thought it would be fun to share. It is entitled “Ode to Christmas” and written by Chuck Kramer. The poem has been around for a couple of decades at least. It is periodically updated:

Lord …and Taylor. Anne Taylor. Anne Klein, Calvin Klein, Cuisinart, Wal-Mart, cotton-polyester, budget stretcher, store-wide, half-off, all sales final, simulated wood-grain vinyl. 12 months interest-free, HD, 3D, 4G, Blue-Ray, Bluetooth, LCD, LED, WiFi, hot-spot, buy a Kindle, or a Nook. Nintendo, Guitar Hero, waterproof, oven-proof, shockproof, 90-proof, down the hatch, dollar-a-batch, doesn’t match, helter-skelter, Alka-Seltzer. Amazon, BestBuy, eBay, Abercrombie, shopping zombie, UPS, CVS, JVC, DVD, GE, GI Joe, Axe, Fax, TJ Maxx, Timex, FedEx, AmEx, Gortex, X-Box, Reeboks, Ink-Jet, Polartec, J Crew, Jean Nate, Cachet, Faberge, Gourmet, Old Spice, LL Bean, I-Pad, I-Pod, I-Zod, Egad! Polo, Play-Doh, Lego, Tickle Me Elmo, Casio, Hasbro, Tyco, Tonka, Barbie, Dolby, Duracell, Eveready, rechargeable, returnable, recordable, portable, digital, trivial pursuit. London Fog, Canadian Club, Scotch Tape, Irish Mist, English Leather, Russian Vodka, Stolichnaya, Sterling Silver, Lady Schick, sure-stick, non-stick, Water-Pik, Shreve, Crump, Low watt, crock, pot. Cotton Dockers? Guess. One Day Sale, Buy Two, Three-speed, Four-slice, Saks Fifth Ave, Windows 7, Nine-volt, Ten-speed, 12-cup, Building 19, 1-800, kilo, mega, giga, tera, byte, white sale, infra-red, Walgreens, Black Friday. Black and Decker, Spelling checker, What the heck, Deck the halls with Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Sansui, Fuji, Sony, Seiko, Samsung, Panasonic, instant classic, automatic, anti-static, alkaline, online, nine to nine, Calvin Klein, Anne Klein, Anne & Hope, Anne Taylor, Lord & Taylor. Good Lord. What have we done to Christmas?

I’ve even heard the rumor that all the celebrations have once again convinced the Sun to return to the Northern Hemisphere.

Have a great Holiday Season and 

Keep to the high ground, 

Jerry

A Pyramid

“The Stock Market,” as represented by the DOW Jones “Industrial” average, now wobbles around 35,000. These days hardly anyone bats an eyelash when the DOW falls (or rises) 500 points in a day. That’s remarkable considering that within the lifetime of many of today’s investors a 500 point drop would have trimmed off more than a fifth of the DOW’s value. (In June 1982 the DOW stood at 2,326.18). 

Stop and think about for a minute what that means. From 1982 to today the value of a portfolio of stocks that mimic the DOW has grown by a factor of 15. In other words, a $1000 investment in this imaginary DOW-mimicking stock index fund made in 1982 would now be worth $15,000. Meanwhile, inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index, has only doubled. That relatively minor $1000 investment made in an IRA or 401k in 1982 would have 7.5 times the buying power today (minus some income tax paid on the withdrawal from the retirement account).

Has the real intrinsic value of this DOW stock portfolio actually risen by 7.5 times in the last 40 years? Here’s where things get weird. Once upon a time investors paid a lot of attention to something called the “Price Earnings Ratio” (P/E ratio). The ownership of stocks rewards investors in two ways, dividends and share price. The price part of the P/E ratio is the cost of a share, while the earnings part is the profit a corporation pays out to investors as dividends. The Price Earnings Ratio of another (and similar) major stock index, the S&P 500, was close to 8 in 1982. The P/E Ratio today is around 37. This rise in P/E ratio is a pretty strong hint that current stocks are “overvalued”, that is, stock prices aren’t justified by the dividends they pay out. 

In a free market, according to the economics I learned in high school, price will rise as demand increases (or supply contracts). In the early 1980s my generation, the “baby boomers” were starting to hitting their stride in the jobs and earnings department. The baby boomers were a bulge in population a portion of which had a lot of self-interested political and economic clout. It should be no surprise that Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) and 401k-s, investment vehicles that accrue investment gains without being taxed (until withdrawal), took off in the 1980s—just as “the Reagan Revolution” got underway.

Someone pointed out to me decades ago that stock values were bound to rise over the long term simply because the baby boomers were destined to bid up stock values. I wasn’t smart enough to notice that IRAs and 401k-s were a made-to-order accelerant of this trend. After all, my parents grew up during the 1929 Crash and the Great Depression that followed. They were leery of stock investments. What money they had was stored in bank accounts drawing interest that barely kept pace with inflation. Retirement was based on social security and pensions—both of which stopped at death and neither of which build wealth that could be passed on to the next generation. 

Now step back and think of everyone who stood at the investment starting line in 1980. Modern-day Republicans would like you to see everyone standing there with no racing handicap, everyone with an equal chance in the race. In fact, that is horse manure. Some entrants in this wealth race came to the starting line with familial wealth behind them that dated back generations, some came with an education supported by the GI Bill, some came who had been excluded from the GI Bill, some came with equity in a home, some came from families that had been restricted to red-lined neighborhoods where home equity didn’t grow. 

Given the variety of handicapping at the starting line in 1980, some were able to scrape together enough to fund food and shelter, some scraped together a little to put in an interest-bearing bank savings account, and some were able to make use of the newly popular investment vehicles, the IRAs and 401k-s. Between the population bulge of the baby boomers and the tax free investment vehicles at their disposal demand rose for ownership of stocks. To mix metaphors, the stock wealth multiplier train left the station—and a whole lot of folks were left behind wondering what happened—and increasingly bitter and guarded. Those who were still running the race in 2008 and were almost in reach of the investment train got swatted back as their investments both in their homes and the stock market cratered. Meanwhile, those who made money by managing money demonstrated by the bank bailouts that they were untouchable, that we really aren’t all in this together. 

Today’s vast differences between workers’ wages and CEO’s salaries and golden parachutes is just the tip of the iceberg of disparate wealth fueled by a stock market that bears no resemblance to the lives a great many people live. 

In this midst of this inflationary wealth spiral for some Republicans have worked hard to make the effects even worse by cutting taxes for the wealthy and slashing estate taxes, making it ever easier to accumulate wealth and pass it on, even as they rely on culture war rhetoric to maintain their minority power.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

Sweep the problem out of sight!

As the streets fill with snow, Christmas shoppers scurry to acquire the latest thing to put under the tree, and the cars snake through Manito Park to enjoy the Christmas lights, the executive branch of City of Spokane government under Mayor Nadine Woodward is getting into the spirit of Christmas, too. Eight days before the celebration of the birth of the Prince of Peace, Mayor Woodward threatened confiscation of the tent dwellings and belongings of the homeless camped out on the public sidewalk around City Hall. After all, it wouldn’t be right for the City to allow a distraction from the season of giving, would it? 

Never mind that Mayor Woodward’s Republican allies on the current three member Spokane Board of County Commissioners are working hard to decide how to spend a federal windfall of 101 million dollars of our income tax dollars from the American Rescue Plan. Never mind that Mayor Woodward and her administration neglected to apply for money appropriated by the State of Washington for efforts to house the homeless. Never mind that home prices and rents in the region are skyrocketing as people move here flush with money from the sale of homes in even more inflated markets. Never mind that bags of PAC money from developers and realtors helped put Ms. Woodward in office—and never mind that these same people are concentrating on refilling those money bags by building and selling homes in the medium and high end market. 

Never mind all that. These folks camped out at City Hall must have, in Republican parlance, made “bad choices” that rendered them homeless. Isn’t it just “tough love” at Christmas time to threaten the homeless with confiscation of their belongings and scatter them to live in their tents in the dark and cold and snow in less noteworthy locations like the vacant land near Freya and the freeway?

Mayor Woodward and her executive branch’s threat against the homeless encamped at City Hall was carefully couched in legalistic wording [the bold is mine]:

The city claims the demonstration poses a health and safety risk, and has impacted access to nearby businesses and City Hall.

“The people are able to come back and spend time and protest and have their voices be known. We’re moving property, not people,” city spokesman Brian Coddington said.

Mayor Woodward and the City’s lawyers are tiptoeing around the legal requirement that available shelter space exist before such clearance (See Section 10.10.026, B., 9, of the Spokane Municipal Code). From the Spokesman article that details the controversy surrounding the Mayor’s order:

City officials acknowledge that there is inadequate shelter space during the day to enforce the city’s laws against camping on public property, which require shelter space to be available as a condition of enforcement.

It goes on:

Coddington said the city issued the notices to ensure people have time to make arrangements to store belongings and find shelter. While acknowledging that the city camping law can’t be enforced because there is not adequate shelter space available during the day time, he said there is available shelter space at night.

“The bottom line is there’s places available to sleep inside,” Coddington said.

To which the people who actually run homeless shelters respond:

“It’s illegal. We don’t have enough shelter beds,” Garcia [of Jewels Helping Hands] said.

Whether there are or are not shelter beds to sleep gets lost in weeds over what constitutes a “low barrier” shelter. Moreover, for convenience the City overlooks the practical matter of actually obtaining a bed in a warm place to sleep. Imagine yourself navigating this territory:

HOC [House of Charity] only has check in between 7 and 8pm.  It does not matter how many beds they have available at 8:01pm because they are closed to check in.  Guests not checked in are not allowed to access day services.  Truth [Truth Ministries] only has check in between 6-7pm and all guests must leave at 6am.  So, until 6pm there is not a single facility a man can access in our city.  Then they must decide which facility to try.  If they walk to Truth (2 miles from downtown) and don’t get in, they very well won’t make the check in at HOC.  If they wait for HOC, they passed the check in at Truth.  Are you starting to see the barriers created?

And this is just finding shelter for one night. Imagine how you would approach seeking employment from the position of having no certain shelter. From the Spokesman article:

It’s hard to go out and get a job when you don’t have a shower every day, if you don’t have clean clothes,” Roofener said. “You tell someone you’re living on the street, they don’t really want to hire you.”

Mayor Woodward was elected in 2019 with a 1.24% vote margin. She was elected with the aid of a record nearly a half million dollars in “independent expenditures” from realtor and developer Political Action Committees. She posted a slanted, politicized video, “Seattle is Dying” to dramatize and frighten over the issue of homelessness and to suggest she held the key to resolving the issue. Since then she has made good on one related (and totally inconsequential) campaign promise: she moved the location of the downtown police precinct. Now, the administration under her leadership having failed to apply for state funds available to address the issue, she orders the homeless outside City Hall swept off to camp in less visible locations. Out of sight, out of mind—and so much for Christian charity in the time of Christmas.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

Echoes from the Aryan Nations

Richard Butler’s Aryan Nations compound north of Hayden Lake, Idaho, was bankrupted, destroyed, and the land donated to the North Idaho College Foundation in 2000-2001. Those of us living here at the time breathed a sigh of relief. It felt like a festering cancer had been excised. The Spokesman article published on September 7, 2010, describing civil rights groups and local government celebrating the ten year anniversary of the excision, ended on what now feels like a prescient note:

Paul Mullet, the self-described national director of the Aryan Nations, contacted the media two weeks ago when he heard about the planned ceremony. He said that although he has moved to Ohio due to a death in the family, the Aryan Nations will never leave North Idaho.

The margins of the excision of the Aryan Nations cancer were never clean. Remnants of the Neo-Nazi, Christian Identity, separatist ideology that Richard Butler fostered locally and nationally from the Hayden Lake compound for thirty years continue to spread, bubbling up in the extremist takeover of the Kootenai County Republican Party and, more recently, the Board of Trustees of North Idaho College (somewhat ironically), and in parts of the SpokaneGOP—think former State Representative Matt Shea, his “Biblical Basis for War” document, and his ongoing efforts to promote a theocratic “Liberty State.” 

All of this is intimately intertwined with “The American Redoubt” (emphasis on the second syllable), a movement in our region of which many folks I seem unacquainted. Not every survivalist or “back-to-the-lander” in the inland northwest subscribes to Redoubt ideology, but many do.

All these strands are loosely tied together in a YouTube documentary with more than 1.5 million views entitled, “Inside the American Redoubt: Trump voters building a new state | Times Documentaries.” I strongly recommend you put it on your viewing list. You will recognize many people and places in the Inland Northwest, including Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich, Matt Shea, John Jakob Schmidt, parts of Coeur d’Alene, North Idaho College, and Hayden Lake. Less widely recognized, you will meet the editor of Redoubt News (a right wing, digital publication of the Redoubt movement); Chris Walsh of Revolutionary Realty in Coeur d’Alene; and one of the surviving trustees of the hostile takeover of the Board of Trustees of North Idaho College. Toward the end you’ll see Matt Shea and John Jakob Schmidt on stage at what I believe (but which is not identified in the video) is a “God and Country” gathering at the Marble Community compound near Northport in northern Stevens County, Washington, just a half an hour from where Cathy McMorris Rodgers grew up and got her start in Republican politics.

Once again, here is the link to the free video in YouTube:

For more links and musings see the P.S.s.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

P.S. We owe the downfall of Richard Butler in large part to the tireless efforts of a newspaper reporter who recently died, Bill Morlin. He covered events in Hayden Lake, the Ruby Ridge standoff, and other extremist events in the region for decades. Were it not for Morlin’s efforts the original Aryan Nations cancer might have grown to a point of being inoperable. Morlin’s efforts will be missed.

P.P.S. Leah Sotille, a terrific young reporter originally based in Spokane, in her podcast series, Bundyville and Bundyville the Remnant, fills in the background to the ideologies now bubbling up in the Redoubt and in a number of domestic terror incidents of the last decades, incidents that might otherwise seem unrelated. I highly recommend either listening to or reading both series accessible at the above links.

A Light Dawns

Many of my generation came away from high school with a sketchy—and sometimes contradictory—understanding of American history. Ascendant among the ideas presented was a unique document, the Bill of Rights, that assured us of freedom from oppression by tyrannical government encroachment. Furthermore, those individual Rights were protected by a judicial system culminating in the U.S. Supreme Court, a judicial system that operated under “the rule of law”. 

The march of American history, we were told, was the story of securing these individual rights (including the right to vote) not just for landed men, but also for women and people of color. The forward march of this concept of individual rights was current in the heady days of the mid-twentieth century when a series of Supreme Court rulings struck down segregation of schools (Brown v. Board of Education) and supported individual autonomy by negating laws against the sale of contraceptives (Griswold v. Connecticut) and a woman’s right to privacy in dealing with pregnancy (Roe v. Wade). 

During the same period of the civil rights movement the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were passed. In the words of Martin Luther King, “the arc of history” was “bending toward justice”. 

Not so fast. Modern-day Republican’s are fond of “states’ rights”, of “originalism” in interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, and of “Freedom” (at least as regards the 1st and 2nd Amendments). When was the last time you heard a Republican laud, or even mention, the 14th Amendment? The Amendments to the Constitution, at least those that follow the Bill of Rights (the first ten Amendments) are off of radar. 

There is a reason for this blind spot. “States’ rights,” often declared to be the issue over which the American Civil War was fought (rather than slavery), is coded language for opposition to the 14th Amendment. Why? The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 shortly after the Union victory in our bloody American Civil War. The 14th Amendment was intended as a turning point in American history, a bending toward justice of history’s arc, an assertion that those human rights declared or implied (see 9th Amendment) by the Constitution —in direct contradiction of the modern-day Republican assertion of “States’ Rights”—were ascendant to State law and enforceable by the federal government. Here’s the text of Section 1 of the 14th:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

“States’ Rights” is code for returning to the ascendancy of state law that existed before the 14th Amendment (and persisted for nearly a century through the Jim Crow era), when states could, and did, enact laws that restricted voting rights and regulated aspects of people’s personal lives without concern over federal interference. “States’ Rights” is code for removing the U.S. Supreme Court’s role in assuring Americans of the rights they are supposed to enjoy under the U.S. Constitution and all its Amendments and leaving the States to ignore the 14th Amendment and do as they please.

Please read Professor of American History Heather Cox Richardson’s post (pasted below). It profoundly changed my grasp of American history and Republican Party rhetoric. (I encourage you to sign up for her daily email if you do not already receive it.)

I will never hear the words “States’ Rights” the same way again.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

Professor Heather Cox Richardson’s December 10, 2021 post in her Letters from an American [the bold is mine—it highlights a statement that struck me like lightening]:

Today, in Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson, the Supreme Court undermined the federal protection of civil rights that has shaped our world since the 1950s.

The case asked whether opponents of Texas’s S.B. 8, the so-called Heartbeat Bill, could bring a federal case to block the law, which gets around normal challenges by putting private individuals, rather than the state itself, in charge of enforcing it. By a vote of 5 to 4, the court said they could sue, but it limited that ability so severely that the law itself will remain largely intact.

The state law, which went into effect on September 1, prohibits abortion after six weeks of a pregnancy, before most women know they’re pregnant. And yet, the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision of the Supreme Court affirmed that women have the constitutional right to abortion without undue restrictions, primarily in the first trimester of a pregnancy.

This case is about far more than abortion. It is about the federal protection of civil rights in the face of discriminatory state laws. That federal protection has been the key factor in advancing equal rights in America since the 1950s.

When the Framers wrote the Constitution in 1787, shortly after the American Revolution against a king colonists had come to believe was a tyrant, many leading Americans were still worried about concentrating too much power in the hands of a chief executive and a central government. In order to convince people to ratify the Constitution, leaders called for explicit limits to what the new national government could do to citizens. In 1791 the nation added ten amendments to the Constitution to protect individual freedom and rights, including, for example, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection from unreasonable searches and seizures, the right to a speedy trial, and so on.

These limits applied to the federal government alone.

States could still enact fiercely repressive laws, including, before the Civil War, laws throwing Indigenous Americans off their lands, denying rights to women (including access to their children in the rare instance of divorce), and enslaving Black Americans. In the wake of the war, legislatures in former Confederate states tried to reassert white control through “Black Codes” that severely limited the rights and protections for formerly enslaved people.

Congressmen recognized the need to use the power of the federal government to override state laws in order to protect equality. In 1866, it passed and sent off to the states for ratification another amendment to the Constitution: the Fourteenth.

The Fourteenth Amendment states that “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The amendment gave Congress the power to enforce the amendment “by appropriate legislation.”

Congress intended for the Fourteenth to enable the federal government to guarantee that Black Americans had the same rights as white Americans, even in states whose legislatures wanted to keep them in a form of quasi-slavery. The states ratified it and it became part of the Constitution in 1868.

In 1870, as white supremacists organized as the Ku Klux Klan terrorized their Black neighbors, Congress passed a law establishing the Department of Justice, which promptly set out to prosecute Klan members, eventually driving the organization underground.

But federal protection of civil rights was both limited and short lived. State legislatures kept or passed wide-ranging discriminatory laws, against Black Americans, for sure, and also against other minorities—Asian immigrants were explicitly prohibited from owning land, for example—and all women. By the early twentieth century, there were state laws against mixed-race marriages, against contraception, against integrated schools and housing, against abortion.

World War II changed the equation. Lawmakers had both to adjust to the demands of the minorities and women who had fought in the war and had kept the factories and fields operating, and to counter communists’ charges that American “democracy” sure didn’t look as equal as communism. To address discriminatory state laws, they turned to the federal government.

After World War II, under Chief Justice Earl Warren and Chief Justice Warren Burger (both appointed by Republicans), the Supreme Court set out to make all Americans equal before the law. They tried to end segregation through the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision prohibiting racial segregation in public schools. In 1965, they protected the right of married couples to use contraception. In 1967, they legalized interracial marriage. In 1973, with the Roe v. Wade decision, they tried to give women control over their own reproduction by legalizing abortion.

Justices in the Warren and Burger courts protected these civil rights by arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment required the Bill of Rights to apply to state governments as well as to the federal government. This is known as the “incorporation doctrine,” but the name matters less than the concept: it said that states cannot abridge an individual’s rights, any more than the federal government can. This doctrine dramatically expanded civil rights.

But opponents of the new decisions insisted that the court was engaging in “judicial activism,” taking away from voters the right to make their own decisions about how society should work. That said that justices were “legislating from the bench.” They insisted that the Constitution is limited by the views of its Framers and that the government can do nothing that is not explicitly written in that 1787 document. They wanted to replace the court’s interpretation of the Constitution with a view that preserved its “original” intent.

The 1987 fight over President Ronald Reagan’s nominee for the Supreme Court, originalist Robert Bork, was the first salvo in the attempt to roll back the court’s expansion of civil rights. Bork was extreme for his day—famously saying that the Constitution did not protect the right for married people to use birth control, for example—and six Republicans joined the Democrats to oppose him. But the swing toward originalism was underway.

Now, finally, thanks to the three Supreme Court justices nominated by Donald Trump and confirmed thanks to then–Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s breaking of the filibuster, the Republicans have cemented an originalist view of the Constitution on the Supreme Court. Their doctrine will send authority for civil rights back to the states to wither or thrive as different legislatures see fit.

In Texas, the legislature has taken away from its citizens a right guaranteed by the Constitution, and the Supreme Court has declined to assert federal power to stop it.

In a partial dissent from today’s decision, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “the clear purpose and actual effect of S.B. 8 has been to nullify this Court’s rulings,” and quoted an 1809 decision that said, “[i]f the legislatures of the several states may, at will, annul the judgments of the courts of the United States, and destroy the rights acquired under those judgments, the constitution itself becomes a solemn mockery.” Roberts warned his colleagues that “the role of the Supreme Court in our constitutional system…is at stake.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor was blunter. Texas has launched “a brazen challenge to our federal structure,” she said, one that “echoes the philosophy of John C. Calhoun, a virulent defender of the slaveholding South who insisted that States had the right to ‘veto’ or ‘nullif[y]’ any federal law with which they disagreed.”

Under this old system, what civil rights will be off-limits?

The court’s “choice to shrink from Texas’ challenge to federal supremacy will have far-reaching repercussions,” Sotomayor wrote. “I doubt the Court, let alone the country, is prepared for them.”

My thinking around “States’ Rights” was further crystallized by reading (the same day) a point-counterpoint that appeared side-by-side on the guest opinion page of the Saturday, December 11, 2021, Spokesman Review digital edition (no paper copy available). Here are the links to the two articles separately:

https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2021/dec/11/jeffrey-sikkenga-change-the-bill-of-rights-dont-be/

https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2021/dec/11/counterpoint-the-bill-of-rights-needed-to-be-updat/

Mr. Sikkenga (the first author, sounding very Republican) tells us that “some [unnamed] people” want to “update” our government and then hones in on an imagined threat to the Bill of Rights—as though Constitutional Amendments ended with the 10th. Ms. Wydra (the second author), in her counterpoint, immediately focuses on Sikkenga’s blind spot: the Bill of Rights and the Constitution of which the Bill is a part were updated—in the Amendments following the Civil War—a fact that Sikkenga denies implicitly. The contrast is glaring.