Tag: constitution

Onward Christian Soldiers: Trump’s War on Iran and Secular America.

In the year 1188 AD, both England and France imposed an income tax to help pay for the third Crusade.  It was called the Saladin Tax.  It was a first.  It was 10 percent.  Saladin was the general, the Sultan, who recaptured Jerusalem the year before, expelling Christan forces who ruled Jerusalem since the first crusade when a Christian army captured the holy city in 1099, butchering most inhabitants. 

Saladin captured the imagination of the West.  They even invented a European origin story for him; he was featured in western literature, to include in Dante’s inferno.  In 1920 when the French General Henri-Joseph-Eugene entered Damascus after the victorious allies divided up the Ottoman Empire amongst themselves – Mandates they called them – he visited Saladin’s tomb and allegedly said, “Mr. Sultan, we’ve returned to the Orient.” 

They drew new maps and new countries.  Syria and Lebanon came under French rule, Palestine and Transjordan went to the British empire.   Europe certainly did return and managed through their imperial hubris, ignorance, and contempt for the peoples of the region, set the stage for over a century of regional and global conflicts and wars over this land. To include Trump’s war with Iran

God, it seems, gets the both the blame and the glory.  Depending on who wins the day.

To listen to Secretary of Defense Hegseth, Trump’s war with Iran is a crusade.  He uses Christian imagery to portray American forces as soldiers of Christ.  His prayers ask that God and Christ guide American bombs, bullets, and missiles to kill evil enemies.  Onward Christian soldiers wearing God as his armor.  He stated that there would be no quarter.  The crusaders in Jerusalem in 1099 offered no quarter.  Man, woman, child, struck down by sword and axes guided by Jesus and God.  

That notion of chivalry and God died on the fields of Flander, the Somme, and Ypres hundreds of years later.

Unfortunately, Hegseth is not an outlier in Trump’s world.  The White House increasingly compares Trump to Jesus, betrayed, and arrested.  At a recent private Easter event, Trump’s spiritual advisor Pastor Paula White-Cain compared the experiences of Christ’s crucifixion to Trump’s legal troubles, you know sexually assaulting a woman in a department store dressing room or paying off a porn star to keep silent about an affair.  Although I think she must have forgotten about these secular trials.  I too see Trump and Jesus in the same thought, every time he opens his mouth or posts on Truth Social, I say, “Jesus Christ, what the fuck did that idiot just say.”

It is not new in our history for American leaders to invoke God, especially after great tragedies or wars or other calamities.  America’s sense of its exceptionalism is deeply rooted in God. That shiny city on a hill.  It is new, however, for an American president to lay claim to divinity.  The Beatles were crucified, pun intended, when they claimed they were more popular than Jesus during a radio interview.

Trump is deliberately, cynically I think, erasing the line between him and Jesus.  Many of his adherents are in lock step with him, nonetheless.  For Trump to claim divine rule requires not only breaking down, but utterly demolishing, the wall between state and church.

Our country has a long history of keeping religion out of state and keeping the state out of religion.  For good reason as we can see by Trump’s insane comparison to Jesus. The Constitution does not mention “God.”  Not even the oath of office for president mentions God.  When asked why God did not appear in the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton famously quipped, “We forgot” or “We don’t need any foreign help.”  Whether these were apocryphal response, I don’t know, but they have a ring of authenticity.

In 1777, while a Delegate to Virginia’s General Assembly, Thomas Jefferson submitted a statute for Religious Freedom.  It was shelved given opposition from the still powerful Anglican Church members. That bill lay dormant of over a decade and was resurrected by James Madison in 1785 after Patrick Henry submitted a bill a year earlier calling for a tax to pay ministers of the Christian religion.  

In response to Henry’s bill, Madison wrote a Memorial and Remonstrance against the assessment.  In it he warned that the state should not support any religion.  That belief in God was between a man and his creator, that the state had no business interfering with such relationship.  He warned that once you support Christian ministers, what will stop a particular sect within Christianity from assuming dominance over the others.  Henry’s bill did not pass.

Virginia’s Baptists supported Madison’s Remonstrance and the Religious Freedom bill.  They had suffered heavily from Anglican Church violence in the 18th Century, especially during the Virginia’s Great Awakening in the 1740s.  Itinerant Baptist ministers were whipped or jailed and driven out of counties. Sadly, many Baptists today who support destroying the barrier between church and state have forgotten that history.

He was right.  In Texas, which provides tax dollars to both secular and religious charter schools, Islamic charter schools requesting public funding are being denied funding, claims leveled about terrorism.  Bashing Muslims has become sport in Texas amongst those Republicans running for office.  A proposed public school reading list contains the bible, but not the Koran.

In addition to the Remonstrance, Madison also resubmitted Jefferson’s decade old bill to Virginia’s General Assembly.  It passed.  Both Madison’s Remonstrance and Jefferson’s bill for Religious Freedom should be required reading.  Both argue that God doesn’t need the State:

“That Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitation, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness….”  Adding, “not to propagating it by coercion …but extend it by its influence on reason alone.” 

What became the first amendment to the constitution, written by Madison, were born in Madison’s Remonstrance and Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom (1786).  It clearly articulates that the government  could not establish a state religion or prohibit the free exercise thereof.  A careful balance.  

In 1802, President Jefferson, in a famous letter to the ‘Danbury Baptists,’ wrote that the 1st Amendment built a “wall of separation between Church and State.”  While Jefferson had no direct hand in the writing of the Constitution — he was the American Ambassador to France during the constitutional convention, and was not in Congress when the propositions were submitted by Madison which became the Bill of Rights — he and Madison regularly corresponded, explaining their thoughts and ideas of government and the constitution.  

This separation of church and state, this wall, has informed the liberal American experiment that in a healthy democracy the role of religion and the role of government are better kept distant and respectful. 

That arrangement worked spectacularly.  Religion thrives in America because of this wall of separation.  It is a paradox then that America aims to finish off a despotic theocratic state in Iran while planting the very seeds of a despotic right wing white nationalist Christian theocratic state in America.  

MAGA voices like Gladden Pappin – who claims the Pope will appoint Melania as queen – and Rod Dreher want American to go back to the Middle Ages, where the church held power, where the Bible was the law of the land. They hate and despise the enlightenment and liberal ideals of democracy, human rights, and the freedom to enjoy a personal relationship with God, without government surveillance and dictate.

The conspicuous and dangerous allusions to Trump, God, and Christ in prosecuting Trump’s war against Iran are anathema to America’s founding ideals and over 250 years of history.  God help us all.

Oral Arguments and Severed Horse Heads: The Supreme Court and Birthright Citizenship

Yesterday the Supreme Court heard arguments in Trump v. Barbara whether Trump’s Executive Order stripping birthright citizenship from children of non-citizens was constitutional.  Every lower court hearing cases regarding the Order ruled that it was unquestionably unconstitutional. The arguments before the justices of our country’s highest court should have taken on the patina of well worn rituals and procedures. However, it was far from normal.

Last year, at an initial hearing before the Court, a majority of justices kept an injunction on the order in place, staying the implementation of Trump’s Order indefinitely.  The vote was 6-3.  Not shocking, given a radical core of conservative justices seem hell bent on overturning everything that smacks of small “l” liberal governance.  The Court could have left the appeals court in ruling in place, basically saying that the lower court’s ruling was sound.  They did not.  Instead, a least four justices voted to hear the case.

Yesterday, in an unprecedented move, Trump attended the oral arguments. His attendance, for all intents and purposes, was a direct attack on the separation of powers enshrined in our Constitution.   Trump did not stay for all of the arguments, leaving after the first hour.  His message sent, I think.  

Most of the justices, it seemed, were skeptical of the government’s argument that birthright citizenship should be limited.  The government’s argument hinged on the words “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” and the word “domicile” in the seminal 1898 Supreme Court ruling United States v. Wong Kim Ark.  Their arguments rehashes of earlier losing arguments.  This should be a slam dunk case, but it isn’t.

In a previous post, I predicted with despair that Trump and the government would prevail.  I thought perhaps I was wrong, and was heartened when the justices in a 6-3 vote kept the injunction in place.  That signaled the government would most likely not prevail in court.  Yet, I worried that at least four justices wanted to hear the case.  

This case should not be a nail biter.  It has been settled law for 128 years.  But with today’s Court consisting of a super majority of conservatives with a hard-core troika of ultra radical conservative justices, anything is possible.  

Enter Trump.  No sitting president has ever attended oral arguments at the Supreme Court. It is unseemly, and I think, an assault on the doctrine of the separation of powers.  His presence was like a dog pissing on a tree, marking its territory.  Trump was marking his Order and signaling to everyone, ‘do not rule against me and my Order.’ It was designed, I argue, to intimidate the justices that are on the fence, so to speak.  That is Barrett and Gorsuch.  Like the Godfather movie, Trump was the decapitated horse’s head laying at the foot of the bed.  A warning of bloody consequences. 

I would not be surprised that folks acting on Trump’s orders engage in a campaign of intimidation, influence, and ever terror against Barrett and Gorsuch in the coming weeks. He will use similar tactics that he has already used on his other perceived enemies.  His no holds barred attack on the Chair of the Federal Reserve is just one very recent example.  DOJ investigations, insinuations of wrongdoing, grand juries, threats of impeachment against other federal judges.  This will get nasty.

Even though many of the justices seemed skeptical in whole or in part of the government’s arguments; to include the Chief Justice Roberts, the majority opinion is far from settled.  The final vote is in doubt in my mind.  Congress abdicated to Trump.   Will the Supreme Court do so as well?   Surrendering the Judicial Branch to Trump, so that he can hang its stuffed head next to all the gold and gild bling in the Oval Office.   That is to be seen.

Break Glass in Emergency: Vote Yes by April 21 in Virginia’s Redistricting Referendum

If things were normal, which they are not, I would oppose returning the drawing of Virginia’s congressional district maps back to the state’s legislature, even temporarily.  America is in deep trouble, however. Democracy is in retreat; the country is ruled by decree out of the White House. Congress sits mute.  A President ruling from his gold encrusted throne threatens to “nationalize” the elections and seems indifferent to his paramilitary police brutalizing communities and shooting and killing citizens.

The Constitution – our written social contract as to how the government is organized and how power is shared – is shredded day-by-day by Trump.  Our representative in the 5th District, John McGuire just voted for the Save Act to make it harder for Americans to vote and agrees with Trump’s call for Republicans to nationalize the vote, or at the least, has not repudiated Trump’s demand.  He thinks he works for Trump and not we the people of his district.  It is time to fight back, it is time to b break the glass because there is a constitutional emergency.

The fastest and best way to check Trump’s unchecked power is by electing Democrats to the House of Representatives – the people’s house – and the senate.  Sensing a coming defeat this November and a loss of a Republican majority in the House of Representatives, Trump demanded that red states redraw their congressional districts, immediately.  If you can’t win fair and square, cheat, lie, and steal is this administration’s mantra.

Texas obliged instantly, without consulting their people.  Another example of rule by dictate far too common in red states.  At least the people of California had a choice whether to redistrict (they voted ‘yes’ this past November).  We the people of Virginia will have our chance to give voice to whether we redistrict.  That vote is April 21.  Early voting starts March 3.   

Democrats did not ask for this redistricting fight, but Trump threw down the gauntlet.  We the people of Virginia must take drastic steps to reclaim sovereignty or lose our democracy to one-party rule and dictatorship. 

Vote YES to temporarily redistrict Virginia’s congressional seats.  

For those constitutional law geeks like me, below are some Frequently Asked Question:

How many other states are redistricting (or counter redistricting) based on Trump’s outrageous demand?

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, five states have already redistricted (Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, California); A number of states have introduced legislation to redistrict (Maryland, South Carolina, Washington, and Virginia):  Florida is in the process of adopting legislation with additional states contemplating redistricting, but awaiting state court decisions (Alabama, Louisiana, North Dakota, and Wisconsin).  Other states have already moved forward and many plan to do so.  Indiana rejected Trump’s redistricting demand.

Why does Virginia need a vote on whether to redistrict its congressional districts?

In November 2020, Virginians voted overwhelming (66 percent) to amend the state’s constitution to appoint a 16-member bipartisan commission to draw Virginia’s congressional districts.  Virginia is one of about a dozen states that have independent commissions to draw congressional maps.  A majority (29) still permit their state legislatures to draw congressional districts.  The referendum vote in April is the only constitutionally sanctioned method to temporarily amend our state constitution so that the Generally Assembly can redraw Virginia’s congressional districts.  

Why hasn’t the Supreme Court ruled that partisan redistricting is unconstitutional?

They did rule, by not ruling.  They took the easy way out and said it was out of their hands, that there were no ‘judicially discoverable’ or ‘manageable standards’ to adjudicate claims of unconstitutionally drawn districts, with one exception, drawing districts to favor white voters (e.g., diluting concentrations of black or brown voices into majority white districts).

A brief recent history:  In 1986, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal courts could hear challenges to how congressional districts were drawn, however, the court offered no standards.  Some years later in 2004, the Supreme Court ruled there were no “judicially discoverable or manageable standards.”  The conservative court inches it way toward legalizing partisan gerrymandering.

In 2019, in Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme court ruled that federal courts could not hear claims of partisan gerrymandering because they – the court — could not articulate any standard by which to judge partisan gerrymandering.  Out of very thin air, they could invent the legal fiction that President Trump is immune from crimes committed for official acts, but these Harvard and Yale legal brains are damned clueless as to how to fix the scourge of gerrymandering.  This legal punt basically legalizes partisan gerrymandering no matter how egregious, at least at the federal court level.  State courts can still hear cases, nonetheless.

To make matters worse, the Rucho decision gave states a “partisan” get-out-of- constitutional jail card for race-based gerrymandering.  In 2024, South Carolina drew racially gerrymandered congressional districts.  The South Carolina NAACP sued.  South Carolian argued it was not racial gerrymandering, but ‘partisan’ gerrymandering.  In a 6 to 3 decision, the Supreme Court agreed with South Carolina and let the racially drawn maps stand.

After Texas redrew its congressional districts after Trump requested it do so, The League of United Latin American Citizens sued.  A federal district court, after 9 days of testimony and review of thousands of documents, concluded that Texas illegally redrew the congressional districts based on race.  In a shadow docket ruling, however, the Supreme Court, overturned the district court and said Texas could use the newly drawn maps.  

The reasons given by the Supreme Court’s were: 1) The District Court failed to “honor the presumption of legislative good faith;” 2) The District Court did not produce a viable alternative map; 3) It was too close to the election to redraw the redrawn congressional maps.   My only response:  What the fuck!  I did not know there was a ‘legislative good faith’ exemption to unconstitutional laws.

So, there you have it.  Go out and vote. And vote Yes.  

‘Ordinary Americans:’  Kristi Noem and Her Police Battalions.

A lone English soldier in his red tunic stood post in front of Boston’s Custom’s House.  ‘Lobster back’ was yelled, words were exchanged, things heated up, a crowd gathered.  Tensions between colonists and soldiers was high.  The colonists thought of them as occupiers.  When all was said and done that March 5, 1770, three Bostonians were dead and another two would die of wounds in days to come.   

The captain, who summoned additional soldiers to face down the hostile and aggressive crowd, and eight other soldiers were later arrested and jailed after the acting governor of Massachusetts called for an inquiry after the shooting.  Seven months later Captain Preston stood trial for murder.  The question was whether he ordered his soldiers to fire.  Testimony by witnesses suggested he did not.  The jury acquitted him.  

A little over a month later, the eight soldiers were tried for murder.  After a record 9 days of testimony, six of the eight were found not guilty.  The remaining soldiers were found guilty of manslaughter verse murder.  That is they had been provoked.  They were offered the “benefit of clergy,” basically proving they could read a verse in the Bible, and were branded on their thumbs verse a jig at the end of a rope.

Bostonians were proud that they could provide a fair trial, that the accused were able to have defense lawyers, one of whom became president of the United States, John Adams, and that the jury of citizens were fair and impartial.

Four years later, however, the English Parliament removed the ability of colonial governments to conduct any judicial proceedings against crown officials who allegedly committed a capital offense while supposedly upholding the law or quelling protests.  It was one of several acts known as the Intolerable Acts enacted following the Boston Tea Party in 1774.  The Administration of justice Act as it was formally known, was nicknamed the ‘murder act’ by colonists.  In short time, America exploded in Revolt in 1775 and declared independence in 1776.  250 years ago, to be exact.

Now, during the 250th anniversary celebration of our independence from capricious rule, Trump and his administration officials have basically reimagined the Administration of Justice Act by repeatedly claiming that federal law enforcement officers have absolute immunity for acts committed to uphold the law or quell protests of ICE operations.  Rule by decree instead of representation has overtaken our government.  Congress has become a debating society of half-wits and imbeciles.

The feds have stifled local and state officials from investigating two homicides committed by ICE or Border Patrol agents.  Following the last homicide, Border Patrol and ICE agents who participated in the assault on, dog pile on, and shooting of Alex Pretti, fled the scene, leaving the crime scene unsecured.

Immediately, Trump advisor, and architect of these brutalist occupations of American cities, Stephen Miller, labeled Pretti an “assassin.” The director of the Border Patrol, defended his agents, saying that Pretti intended to shoot ICE and Border Patrol agents without any evidence other than Pretti was carrying.  He was. He had a concealed carry permit but did not draw his weapon or attempt to draw his weapon.  Video evidence suggests an agent had taken Pretti’s gun moments before a single gunshot rang out, followed by a barrage of gun shots directed at a prone, non-resisting Pretti.

Another heinous and unprovoked murder by Trump’s masked agents.  

As every day passes into tomorrow, ICE and Border Patrol Agents look and act more like the reserve police battalions that followed the advancing German army in to Poland at the start of the second world war than true law enforcement officers.  These reserve police officers, recruited from Germany’s working classes, slaughtered millions of Jews.  

These reserve police officers, who Daniel Goldhagen argued in Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust were conditioned to kill, and willingly did so.  Goldhagen wrote, “Simply put, the perpetrators having consulted their own convictions and morality and having judged the mass annihilation of Jews to be right, did not want to say “no.””

My point is not that ICE and Border Patrol Agents are Nazis, although, like the German death battalions, they are armed like soldiers, dress like soldiers, think like soldiers, and act like soldiers. The things they do lack, however, are martial discipline and apolitical ethos of real professional American soldiers and well-trained law enforcement. 

It is this militarized police mindset, paired with Trump and his administration’s psychologically conditioning, that has caused ICE and Border Patrol agents to act in similar ways that the reserve police battalions behaved: Occupy supposedly ‘enemy’ cities (Trump’s words not mine), execute orders without question, and if need be, kill for ideological reasons. They have turned ordinary men and women into real and potential killers.  Recall Trump’s speech to his assembled generals not so long ago.

Trump and rightwing conservatives have engaged in a pattern of excluding, stigmatizing, and humiliating migrants, especially migrants of color.  Dehumanizing them like the Nazis did Jews.  Trump’s claims of Haitians eating pets and his recent denigration of all Somalis as low-IQ are examples of this conditioning.  It does not help that the Supreme Court conditioned citizenship and legal presence in America with whiteness. 

It takes more than conditioning, however, to make ordinary people kill.   Neo-ICE and Border Patrol agents must be raised in a family and community environment that leads them to believe and tolerate what Trump and his acolytates openly spew every day. Racism and white supremacy are alive and well in many corners of America.  It is blasted from Fox News broadcasts every single day.  It takes a village to raise a kid, it also takes a village of racists to raise a kid to become a killer.

Americans must not only condemn the individual actions of ICE and Border Patrol agents but the men and women in leadership — from Trump, to Vance, to Miller, to Bondi to Noem, to Bovino and downward – who articulate, condone, and encourage gratuitous violence and protect the murderers in the name of white nationalism.  When ICE treats migrants and protestors like Noem treats her dogs, we must do what we can to stop the madness.

Get ICE and border patrol battalions out of our cities.  Retrain them, fire the zealots, and sack their leadership, including Bondi, Bovino, Noem, Miller, and Patel.  Most importantly, to diffuse the tension, let local and federal agencies jointly investigate the homicides of Good and Pettri, and if charges are warranted, let a local jury decide their guilt or innocence.  That is the American way.  

The alternative is revolution.

“Guards of this Kind:” A Brief History of the Original Intent of Madison’s Second Amendment.

New York Times Reporter: “Do you see any checks on your power….”

Donald Trump:  “Yeah, there is one thing.  My own morality.  My own mind.  It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

No Mr. President, we the people can stop you.

What is happening in America is not normal.   When a president sitting in the White House, stewing in his own grievances and thirst for vengeance and proclivity to spectacle, says he is only bound by his “morality,” we as a nation are in deep trouble.  As is the world.

I know this essay’s title may make some folks uncomfortable, but please bear with me (yes, a pun). I am self-aware enough to understand that invoking the Second Amendment can be provocative. I struggled while writing this essay on a number of levels. First, is that it even had to be written. Given the words and actions of Trump, I feel it is necessary. On another level, I don’t want to be interpreted as calling for armed revolt. I do not want that. That would be insane.

My whole adult life was living, working, or traveling to conflict and war zones, failed and failing states, police states. I know that option to be unacceptable. On a third level, I feel too many Americans are indifferent or distracted or worn. down and just don’t give a shit, that only some people are impacted and they will never by touched. Inevitably, in a dictatorship, even it you agree with the dictator now, you will be touched and your soul will be crushed eventually as you tire of being told what to watch, what to read, and what to think. Because you are reading this, you know I hit the publish button.

I want to lay out my thoughts on the limits of power of the central government and what States can do once Trump and federal government blows past those limits.  The origin and intent of the Second Amendment figures prominently in any discourse about how to create “guards” to a tyrannical central government.

Blue states continue to get pounded by the Trump administration.  It routinely withholds funds from blue states as punishment for resisting his policies.  Incongruously, it is the blue states that provide most tax raised monies to the federal government, with red states getting more federal tax dollars in terms of spending than they actually put in. In essence, Trump is super charging the transfer of wealth from blue to red states.  Oh, the irony.

Trump targets blue states and cities with mass deployments of militarized immigration agents as punishment for deigning to treat migrants as human beings.  As the result of protests against these deployments, Trump federalized and deployed national guard units without traditional requests from state governors, and in all instances in blue states, against the wishes of the governor and the majority of the state’s peoples, to quell, he alleges, widespread violence, but we know it is to smother the people’s voices.  

Now he is deploying hundreds of additional Homeland Security agents to investigate alleged fraud in Minnesota’s social safety net programs, according to DHS’s secretary.  A calculated and chilling response to the protests over the killing of a woman by an ICE agent and the states demand to be included in the investigation of the homicide of Renee Good.  Incongruously, Trump condemns the death of protestors in Iran, but claims an American protestor shot and killed by an ICE agent was a domestic terrorist, and, intoned, deserved to die.  

Hey, Ayatollah in Iran.  News Flash:  Just rebrand Iranian protestors as deranged left wing domestic terrorists.  Then you are good to go.

This is what despots do.  They flood the streets with thugs and faceless paramilitaries and then sanction investigations to cover up murders. Nazis Germany’s Brown Shirts of the past are being reborn as combat fatigue wearing ICE agents.

This is what he will do to Virginia now that we will have a democratic governor and a state legislature controlled by democrats.  Expect payback with canceled programs, stopped federal grants, and deployments of Homeland Security agents to intimidate citizens.

The ability of a state to resist a tyrannical central government is how the Second Amendment was born.

What became the Second Amendment was not intended as an individual right to bear arms but a collective right of a state to bear arms to maintain its’ citizens inalienable rights.  Lord Dunmore, the English Governor of Virginia’s, attempt to seize the militias’ arms in Williamsburg, Virginia, at the outset of America’s first civil war was still fresh in the mind of the founding generation.  

It never crossed the minds of folks back then that the constitution needed to enumerate the right to own firearms for defense or hunting at the federal level.  Gun ownership – mostly muskets — was so ubiquitous and a traditional right in the colonies that enumerating the right would be ridiculous.  States had the right to regulate firearms and did so, most notably restricting possession primarily to whites.  

The Second Amendment was intended as a state’s right to maintain armed militias for their defense against a tyrannical central government.  It was a meant as bulwark of self defense against a large standing Army used by the central government to impose its will on a state or states. If you follow how the language of the amendment changed and unfolded, I think one can get a sense of what the intent was and how the amendment was seen and understood within a broader conception of constitutionalism, tradition, common law, and gun possession in the early republic.

On June 8, 1789, James Madison introduced nine propositions or resolutions for amending the Constitution. From these propositions the House of Representatives would derive 17 amendments, of which, ten would eventually become the Bill of Rights. Way down the list, buried in proposition four, after statements about religious freedom, freedom of speech and press, the right to peaceable assembly and petitioning for redressing of grievances, Madison, proposed what would become the second amendment.

The Annals of Congress contains the record of the running debates surrounding the amendments to the Constitution and reflect contemporaneous conceptions of the meanings of these amendments, and how they changed over the debates. Madison, borrowing from the other state constitutions and even the 1689 English Bill of Rights, proposed the following language regarding the right to bear arms (House Records, pp. 451-452):

“The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.”

Madison’s propositions did not gain much traction in Congress. Members of Congress were more concerned with the mechanics of setting up a functioning government. The debates preceding and surrounding the discussions on the proposed amendments centered on funding mechanisms and structure of the various executive departments being contemplated. Madison nonetheless persisted, and on July 21 requested further consideration of the amendments. After “desultory” conversation on the amendments, they were referred to a committee of eleven, which included Madison.

Just short of a month later, the committee of eleven finished their work on the proposed amendments and presented them to the House of Representatives on August 17. Madison’s language on bearing arms was revised and read:

“A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; but no person religiously scrupulous shall be compelled to bear arms (House Records, p.778)

Eldridge Gerry of Massachusetts, a veteran of the constitutional convention in Philadelphia in 1787, and who was one of three delegates who refused to sign the Constitution at the end of the convention, led the debate regarding the amendment to bear arms. His remarks are crucial, I think to understanding, the intent of this amendment. He states:

“This declaration of rights, I take it, is intended to secure the people against the mal-administration of the Government; if we could suppose that, in all cases, the rights of the people would be attended to, the occasion for guards of this kind would be removed (p. 778).”

Not one person during the debate contradicted or challenged Gerry’s assertion, which seems to state that the ability to keep and bear arms referred to the people’s ability to form militias as a collective defense against a tyrannical central government. The remainder of the debate that day on this amendment surrounded primarily the question of religious scruples and service in the militia.

After more “desultory” (I love that word) conversation, 17 proposed amendments to the Constitution were sent to the Senate on August 24. The bearing arms amendment was number 5 and read after some minor tweaking (Senate record, pp. 63-64):

“A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed, but no one religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.”

On September 4, the senate, whose records of debate are not as detailed as the House’s records of debate, showed that senators objected to a number of the amendments, but without comment as to why. “On the motion to adopt the fifth article of the amendments proposed by the House of Representatives, amended to read as followeth: ‘a well regulated militia, being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed:’ It passed in the affirmative” (Senate Record, p. 71).

So, there you have it, a brief but spectacular history of the origin of the Second Amendment.

Trump’s advisor Stephen Miller’s call to abandon America’s social contract and resort to a ‘state of nature’ where brute force is the first and only response should scare the shit out Americans.  This new dogma of ‘power, strength, and violence’ will fundamentally rewrite the world order but also crush America’s social contract between the people and the government:  the annihilation of the separation of powers, the demise of a democratic central government, and the eradication of shared sovereignty between the states and the central government.  That, good reader, is why we have “guards of this kind,” the Second Amendment. 

Let me be clear, I am not calling for armed revolt or violence against our central government or secession, I still believe in the vote and the power of the American people to reign in Trump.  But as Congress and the Supreme Court not only fail to curtail Trump’s excesses, and in fact enable him, what are the people to do?  

States are the peoples last bulwark against Trump and a despotic central government.  A new pposition is rising, however.   Not from spineless democratic leaders like Schumer, but from Republicans.  Republican Senators that voted to restrain Trump’s war powers received threatening profanity laced phone calls by Trump.  A sign he is losing control and trying to bully folks back into line.

What I ask is that our new, incoming governor, think long and hard about how to deal with an increasingly authoritarian and despotic central government that continues to ratchet up the level of violence against the people in targeted states and cities – maladministration as Eldridge Gerry put it.  The governor needs to develop contingency plans on when and how to resist, to include using the National Guard to defend our natural and inalienable rights as a free people of Virginia.  

It seems to me America cannot long remain a nation if Trump puts his boot on the neck of blue states while red states happily bend the knee to the tyrant in the White House. Time to mobilize once again, stay engaged, and get family and friends to vote this November.

Usufruct

No, not a misspelling, and no, it has nothing to do with high fructose corn syrup or inedible holiday Fruit Cake.  I came across this word almost three decades ago when reading Peter Onuff’s Jeffersonian Legacies, an edited compilation of essays following a scholarly conference celebrating Thomas Jefferson’s 250th birthday.  

Herbert Sloan’s essay “The Earth Belongs in Usufruct to the Living,” deconstructs Jefferson’s September 1789 letter to James Madison.  Usufruct, basically as Jefferson knew the word, was the right to use something during one’s lifetime, like land or other property, but not destroy the value of the property through misuse, or, in in some instances, generating debts that are worth more than the property.  

He expresses his concerns in the letter whether one generation can “bind” the next generation to its debts. He thinks this issue has not been thoroughly thought through as the new Constitution comes into effect, at least metaphysically. Jefferson wrote, “[T]he earth belongs in usufruct to the living, that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.  The portion occupied by an individual cease to be his when himself ceases to be. & reverts the society.”  That is, when a generation dies off, so too should its debts. Those debts are more than pecuniary, he implied.

He expands on this theme throughout the letter, thinking aloud, and through his own arithmetic of averages of life expectancies, argued to Madison that a constitution, and laws the emanate from it, should expire after 19 years.  An average, he surmised when one generation succeeds another.   Every generation, he argued should be able to make its own laws and government, and I would surmise, even remake the social contract.  Basically, new generations should not be bound or governed by outdated laws or drown in the debts contracted by a generation long dead.  He was particularly concerned with debt.  Yet ironically, he died a debtor.

He gave one example of how the new Constitution, ratified and placed into effect in 1789, addressed this issue of government debt.   The Constitution gave congress the enumerated right to wage war, vice the chief executive:  “We have already given in example one effectual check to the Dog of war, by transferring the power of letting him loose from the Executive to the Legislative body, from those who are to spend to those who are to pay.”  

We, as a nation, squandered that gift of restricting a King — or a President — from declaring or making war.  Congress handed back the ability to wage war beyond our borders to the President with the War Powers Resolution Act of 1973 (ironically an act designed to limit executive powers).  This limited power to wage war by the Executive was dramatically expanded in 2001, after Congress gave the President power to wage war against terrorism, in the so-called global war on terrorism.  But I don’t want to write about Trump’s march to war against Venezuela using those 2001 powers, or his new Monroe Doctrine of imperialism to dominate the Western Hemisphere through force of arms, but to a real existential threat to our country: anthropogenic climate change.

For generations, fiscal conservatives have used a version of Jefferson’s usufruct principle to argue against a growing national debt.  They contended that future generations should not be burdened by huge debts, which sap economic growth and weight workers with heavy taxes.  At least that was their argument, until it wasn’t.  When it comes to saddling the next generations with huge climate debts that must be paid as mother nature demands it, conservatives are not only mute about this principle of usufruct, but chant along with Trump, “drill baby drill.’  

This Administration’s policy of increasing fossil fuel consumption, destroying renewable energy initiatives, undermining electric vehicles, and hobbling renewable energy manufacturing and infrastructure — so that Trump and wealthy elites can profit and live in splendor — at the expense of unborn generations, is astounding.  It is immoral and criminal to condemn unborn children to a dystopian world of climate disaster by a bunch of fat old white men who will be soon moldering in their own graves.   

Jefferson was right.  A generation — our’s in particular — has an obligation to be good stewards of America’s natural resources and bounty so that future generations are not bound by destructive practices that degrade and pollute our water, our air, our food, and our climate out of greed and ignorance. 

The baby boomers had a chance after the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, but like the war powers fiasco, we squandered our chances long ago to do right by Mother Nature and future generations.  Shame, shame on us.  The next generations have no obligation to forgive us, nor should they.  Sorry Gen Z and the Millennials, we royally screwed you by binding you to a no-win situation regarding climate change.  Mother Nature is not as forgiving as an accountant in the Congressional Budget Office.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Yes, even in these trying times one must have hope. I will be taking a break over the holidays so see you in the new year. Thanks.

   

“I Believe Him”

Today, America’s national security policy, as it pertains to international relationships, is more akin to looking for a gas leak with lighted matches than serious deliberations.  That makes the world a more dangerous place and Americans less safe.

The Washington Post in a recent article claimed that Secretary of Defense Hegseth ordered a second strike on a destroyed boat to kill two survivors clinging to the wreckage.  The extra judicial murder of alleged drug smugglers is a crime in its own right; the murder of two survivors is particularly heinous.

These murders threatens our intelligence network as key partner allies back away from sharing intelligence.. Hegseth denies giving such orders and now claims an Admiral directed the second strike.  Trump says, “I believe him.”  This is a Trump pattern.

Trump, and therefore America, has an “I believe him” problem.

Trump brags about killing alleged drug smugglers one minute and then post on social media that he will pardon the ex-president of Honduras, who is serving 45 years in a federal prison for, well, drug smuggling, claiming he got a bad deal. Another example of I believe him syndrome.

 The ex-Honduran president during his term turned Honduras into a narco-state, one step worse than the kleptocracy it has been for decades. Following his term in office in 2022, Hernandez was indicted on drug trafficking and weapons charges, following a long investigation by Trump’s Justice Department during his first term.  

Honduras is a major drug transshipment country, accounting, with some estimates, for between 75 and 90 percent of all cocaine that reaches the U.S.  Less than 2 or 3 percent of all US bound drugs come through Venezuela, yet 10 percent of our entire Navy is in the Caribbean murdering alleged Venezuelan drug smugglers. That means more drugs in America not less.

In his first term Trump famously threw the whole of American intelligence under the bus, when he stated at a joint press conference with Putin in Finland, that he believed Putin’s denials of interfering in the 2016 election over the national intelligence assessment that he did. 

A few weeks ago, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto head of state for Saudi Arabia, was feted with a State Dinner at the White House.  The Crown Prince was persona not grata since 2018 after the murder of American permanent resident and Washington Post journalist Jamal Kashoggi.  If you don’t recall, Kashoggi was lured to the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, where he was drugged, murdered, and dismembered by a Saudi government hit team in the Consulate.  His body disappeared.  Our intelligence service determined that the murder was orchestrated by the Crown Prince. 

At a White House press event earlier in the day, the Crown Prince was asked about the Kashoggi murder by an reported from ABC.  After calling ABC fake news, Trump responded that ‘a lot of people didn’t like that gentleman [Kashoggi] ‘’, adding, “whether you like him or not, things happen.’  Trump followed up by defending the Crown Prince, stating that the Crown Prince denies any involvement in the killing, and “we can leave it at that.”  Another ‘I believe the man’ moment.  Trump also denied profiting personally from his Saudi connections. A $63 billion real estate deal with a firm connected to the Royal family says otherwise.

Never in my three decades experience in the foreign service arena has American national security and foreign policy been so chaotic, disjointed, lawless, undisciplined, and shortsighted.  From illegal tariffs, extrajudicial killings, interfering in elections, defending murders of dissidents, propping up authoritarian regimes, destabilizing alliances, breaking treaties and agreements, suspect travel bans, and massive curtailment of humanitarian aid, this administration has made America a pariah. Hero to zero in 200 days.

This all makes Americans less safe, domestically and abroad.  It also impacts Americans in other facets of our daily lives: American exports become less attractive; Americans pay higher prices and import taxes; more illegal drugs not less, America’s rural health care deteriorates further as foreign born and trained doctors and nurses, who make up a large share rural American health care provider, stay away;  America loses the talent wars as scientists and researchers shun work in America and head to other countries. These are not America first policies, but America last policies.  And when Trump says, “I believe him,” don’t. Look for the grift and the greed.

In Congress, July 4, 1776

It is good now and then to read some of our founding documents. The Declaration of Independence is a good place to start as any. It basically is two documents. The first part is a declarative statement that both King and Parliament have, and continued to, violate the the fundamental and inalienable rights bequeathed to Englishmen since time immemorial. Such trespasses forced the colonists, so they wrote, to form a new government to secure their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The second part is a jeremiad of those violations. Of the 27 listed grievances, our president has also committed many of these same trespasses. These include, (1) obstructing the administration of justice; (2) he has attempted to make judges dependent upon him; (3) deployed members of our “standing army” among us in times of peace; (4) he is attempting to render the military independent of and superior to Congress; (5) he has threatened to send Americans overseas to serve time in foreign jails for pretended offenses; (6) for cutting off our trade with the world with illegal tariffs; (7) of imposing taxes on us without our consent (illegal tariffs); (8) depriving many inhabitants of due process virtually suspending habeas corpus; (9) and threatens weekly, if not daily, to declare certain cities out of his protection and insinuate waging war against them.

About 30 percent of the fundamental rights listed by our revolutionary founders they claimed the King and Parliament violated are the same inalienable rights Trump is violating, attempting to violate, or wants to violate. To this list of violations, we can add end birthright citizenship; shutdown the government; hijacking the enumerated rights of Congress; the president not subject to criminal jurisdiction (a King).

What is at stake is not just our Constitution — our written framework of our government and how it should function to protect our inalienable rights — but to the unwritten fundamental rights and laws that make up our social compact with our government. These rights go back to not only the Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights, but to the traditions, customs, and common law of England. They predate our Constitution, Bill of Rights, and other constitutional amendments. Our Constitution and Bill of Rights don’t grant us these rights, they are an acknowledgment of the collective rights we inalienable have had since time immemorial. Trump has no right to deny or suppress them and he must be resisted.

The Declaration of Independence

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

The Strange Death of Liberal Congress (Small l)

 Elected assemblies were no stranger to colonial Americans before the Revolution.  Virginia’s General Assembly first meet in 1619.  The American colonies’ long experiences with representative assemblies informed the debate on the creation of our national government as expressed in our Constitution.

The Constitution created three separate and equal branches:  Executive, Judicial, and Legislative.  The legislative branch was divided into two.  A House of Representatives, directly elected by the people every two years, and a Senate.  The Senators were not elected by the folks of their states but picked by state legislators.  This changed in 1913 — in an age of reform after Gilded Age excesses when ‘robber barons’ (proto-tech bros) bought and sold senators – when the 17th Amendment was adopted.  This amendment made senators directly elected and accountable to the people of their various states. 

As the drafters of the Constitution debated structure of the national legislature, it is clear many mistrusted rule by the masses.  The solution was another level of checks and balances:  A divided Congress.   The House was meant to represent the hot and passionate voice of the people, hence the two-year election cycle.  The Senate was meant to temper and cool the passions of the people, hence the six-year terms.  A ying-yang type of thing. 

In its time, it was a liberal creation (small l).  A directly elected national assembly rare.  Although one must add a huge asterisk to that claim as suffrage was primarily reserved for men who owned property, and in many instances in the early republic to white men only.  Eventually the franchise did expand, with women being the last added. As a side note, I should comment that white immigrant men could and did vote in national elections as voting rights were not tied to citizenship until well into to the 19th century.   Many states permitted immigrants the right to vote into the early 20th century.  The nationalism of the post-world war I era ended that practice.

The enumerated duties of Congress were listed in the Constitution, but, it’s primary duty was a check on the power of President (king) — in the liberal tradition of Great Britian since the Glorious Revolution of 1689.  As such, the list of congressional powers was long and gave congress the power to declare war, the power of the purse, the regulation of the militia and Army, the power to regulate domestic and foreign trade, to list a few.  For the Senate, the power to ratify treaties and confirm presidential nominees to high office was added.  

This system basically worked for close to 236 years, until it didn’t.  It’s not the structure.  Our political party system is fatally broken.  You need two parties, not one party and one cult lead by a messianic Daddy Trump.

Congress is dead.  Long live Trump.  

A postmortem would reveal the cause of death as neglect followed by blunt force trauma.  The manner of death?  Democracide.

 Et Tu, Johnson and Thune?  Speaker Mike Johnson and senate majority leader John Thune have murdered Congress, finishing the job started by Mitch McConnell.   Johnson won’t even call the House back into session and Thune has attached himself to Trump’s scrotum like a sucker fish attaches itself to a shark. This week Sec Def Hegseth severely constrained congressional oversight by severing most routine formal and informal discourse between congress and the Defense Department and one trillion dollars in spending.  

Trump literally shits on the people in his AI generated fantasies and Congress defends him. He frequently moves money without congressional official approval and routinely uses rescission to ignore legislative funding bills.  In short, Congress ceded most of its enumerated powers to Trump.  Even the act of declaring war has been ceded, permitting Trump to order extra judicial killings on the high seas.  In the old days we called that piracy.  Congress is dead in name. 

The Supreme Court is the undertaker.

I have no concluding paragraph.  What is there left to say any more?  The phrases “that’s illegal” or “that’s unconstitutional” are deader than a door nail in a post law and order America. Might as well stop using them as they are as useless as Congress and a spittoon full of spit.

15 Minutes Past Midnight: Virginia Votes

Many of us recall the doomsday clock during the Cold War.  It was always minutes before midnight:  Nuclear Armageddon.   Today there is another clock ticking away as our democracy ebbs.  If midnight was the hour when democracy ends, the clock today would read 15 minutes past midnight.  Yes, we have crossed that line into the shadow of autocracy.  We can, however, reset that clock, but we must do it quickly and the first step is to vote.  

Election day is upon us here in Virginia and we have an opportunity to reset that clock.  It will be a consequential election with generational impacts for Virginians.  Think of the world your child, or grandchild, or great grandchild will be born into if Trump has his way. 

First and foremost, your vote will help keep Virginia from following several Republican states down the rabbit hole of one-party authoritarian rule.  Texas is the architype of such a state: Texasistan.

 A neo-theocratic state where women are surveilled and reduced to second class citizen.  A state where race equates to citizenship; a state where people of Latino ancestry are subject to constant local, state and federal police stops and detentions for simply having a certain physical appearance, speak Spanish, and work in low wage jobs.  Guilty!  

Texas is a state that happily offers to deploy its national guard soldiers to occupy cities in Democratic lead states as Trump’s armed enforcers.  A state where Christianity is foisted on folks’ children in public schools who worship differently or choose not to believe.  Ones relationship to your god is between you and your creator and the state has no place in that relationship.  We don’t want to be that kind of state, Winsome Earle-Sears does.

Second, Sears wants to turn the clock back to the 19th century regarding women’s rights.  She spent her whole campaign using trans kids as political fodder, ostensible as a women’s rights issue.  Meanwhile, she voted ‘no’ on a tie-breaking vote as Lt. Governor on a bill that would have given Virginia women reproductive choice rights, in particular access to contraception.   

She claims to protect your daughter from supposed predators while whole heartily supporting a president found by a civil jury to have sexually assaulted a woman in a department store dressing room.  And then Sears has the temerity to tell a woman that she has no right to reproductive choices or contraception, the right to choose when and how to have a family.    

Third, a medical and insurance crisis is in the offing after the passage of the Republican’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which Sears endorsed.  Many Virginians will lose Medicaid coverage starting in 2027 as part of the bill’s multibillion dollar cuts to Medicaid.  Three rural health clinics have already closed or plan to close because of the bills impacts.

Approximately 400k Virginians get medical insurance through the Affordable Care Act (ACA).  Given the lapse in ACA insurance subsidies under the bill’s provisions, many of these Virginians will have to give up medical insurance given that premiums will double and even quadruple as subsidies for low-income folks lapse under the bill by the end of this year.  Health care insurance will once again become unaffordable to average Virginians.  

Spanberger has a plan.  According to the Virginia Mercury, Spanberger said, “It’s essential that we be able to strengthen access to health care, improve affordability, and recognize that for so many Virginians, they’re one medical event away from really substantial ruin,” Spanberger adding. “But for so many, (health care cost) is just one more worry that keeps them up at night.”  Sears on the other hand has no plan, except to support the big, beautiful bill.

Fourth, Spanberger will return our schools back to the people, and rid us of the Youngkin and Sears Orwellian thought police.  Remember Governor Youngkin’s attempt to turn our schools in to Stasi-like institutions where teachers and students were under constant surveillance for utterances that contradict sacrosanct Republican notions of history.  Youngkin even started an informant hotline one could call or email to report thought transgressors.  Is that how we raise our children? Turning them into government snitches. 

Youngkin’s education policy was a flop at best.  Under his administration, standardized test scores that remained essentially the same after four years of his administration, and well below pre-pandemic scores.  In short, a failure to achieve one of his top priority goals. Winsome Earle-Sears won’t do much better, I suspect, since she is an advocate for reducing public school funding in favor of private charter schools.

Fifth, Spanberger will be a voice for Virginia’s farmers who are hard hit by Trump’s self-inflicted tariff wars (see last week’s post).  Virginia farmers are losing overseas markets, losing income, and being weighed down by unsustainable debt.  Bail outs aren’t an answer, the preferred Republican solution.  It’s the coward’s way out of not confronting Trump head on.  If you are a afraid to criticize Trump, you already live in your own mental dictatorship.  

Spanberger will speak truth to power, I believe. Nor cower before Trump like so many Republicans in Congress and state governments.

Sixth, Spanberger will fight for Virginian’s serving in not only our military, but our civil and foreign services as well.  Our foreign and civil service Virginians are patriots and deserve much better than mass illegal firings, the constant dehumanization and criminalization, the threats and intimidation.  

They, along with the men and women who serve in our armed forces, are the frontline against Trump’s extra-judicial and unconstitutional attempts to turn America into a police state, an autocracy.  Congress is AWOL, the lower courts are fighting a brave rearguard action, only to be undermined repeatedly by the Supreme Court in yet another opinionless shadow docket ruling.  

States are the bulwark against a tyrannical central government.  It’s how our founders envisioned our federal alliance in 1787.  States need to stand up to Trump and his federal maladministration. Virginia needs to be one of those states.

Things will get worse for America and Virginia under Trump in the next few weeks, months, and years.  We need a strong democratic coalition in Virginia to weather the coming constitutional tempest and damage that may prove fatal to the rule of law.  We must fight, and fight to win.  A Spanberger win in November will set the tone for 2026 and beyond.

Let’s keep Virginia democratic and its people free: Vote.