Wednesday, July 9, 2025

Postmortem of an American town-hall meeting

Congressman Pete Sessions conducts a town-hall meeting at Robinson Junior High School.

Ninety minutes into Republican Congressman Pete Sessions’ confrontational, exhausting, two-and-a-half-hour town-hall meeting at Robinson Junior High School last month, I realized it was another spectacular all-American failure in how such gatherings are managed, intentionally or not, to produce frustration, misunderstanding, alienation and hostility — and not just in citizen constituents of all political stripes but in this case the congressman, understandably tired and testy by evening’s end.

By the time I reached home, I also concluded the rancorous meeting encapsulated our nation in the Age of Trump: The longtime congressman and many of the evening’s players (though not all), whether supportive or adversarial in their roles, often displayed the worst of our tumultuous times — sanctimonious to the point of blasphemy; rambling if not verbose; contemptuous if not belligerent, spoiling for a fight; and uninformed, sometimes proudly, patriotically and defiantly so.

For instance, did retired Army Green Beret, former McLennan County Republican Party chair and local attorney Jon Ker, who served with the much-decorated 5th Special Forces Group Airborne in Vietnam, really believe he would set the right tone at the outset by invoking God to vilify those who see something inherently wrong in U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Enforcement raids conducted so haphazardly, without legal discernment or decency, that legal immigrants and U.S. citizens are sometimes swept up in indiscriminate dragnets?

“Gracious heavenly Father,” Col. Ker said after removing his cowboy hat and commanding others to do likewise, “we humbly come before you tonight to, first, praise and worship you for being our god and guide in these times of contrast – the contrast of celebrating the nation you formed through our Founding Fathers by showcasing the Army’s 250th year of protection and valor of our people, contrasted against the damage, destruction and death from riots across the nation by those who hate—.” At this point, loud constituent boos drowned out the invocation.

The 78-year-old veteran continued: “Even so, we know that even in the darkest and most difficult times, you are with us and nothing formed against you and us will prevail. Father, you have blessed us with leaders that love you, that seek your wisdom to serve the people and who are not afraid to stand against evil, untruth and tyranny [more heckling erupts] – men like Congressman Sessions. We lift him before you that he receives your blessings, your wisdom, your truth and your stamina. As he serves us in Washington, may he first serve you in his heart.”

One wonders whom Ker targets in his reference to “evil, untruth and tyranny.” Possibly this was another dig at Los Angeles protesters, a small, resolutely defiant group better handled by local law enforcement than the National Guard personnel and Marines ordered out by President Trump amid great fanfare. Or maybe Ker refers to millions of Americans participating in the nationwide, largely peaceful “No Kings” protests overshadowing, on the same day, Trump’s command performance of a parade in Washington, D.C., honoring the Army’s 250th birthday and his own 79th birthday.

So much, too, for using the Army as a nationally unifying rallying point. Days earlier President Trump violated longstanding, sacrosanct military protocol at Fort Bragg by drawing cheers for his reelection from uniformed Army soldiers employed as props for his fiercely politicized speech; sympathetic jeers as he maligned political enemies (including a former commander in chief); and more cheers (at least from white soldiers) in gloating over his renaming of Army forts to honor Confederate heroes who vigorously fought against the U.S. Army in our nation’s deadliest war. 

Some local “No Kings” protesters attended Sessions’ town-hall meeting, most armed not with signs but questions and concerns in the tumultuous Age of Trump. Signs brandished two days earlier at the corner of Valley Mills Drive and Waco Drive included one held by a Hispanic veteran who wore a T-shirt: “American Grown with Mexican Roots.” His sign: “We swore an oath to OUR CONSTITUTION, NOT to a KING or wannabe DICTATOR.” Another sign that day tells the rest of the story: “They want us to HATE each other. Don’t let them.”

One marvels at the timing of Ker’s “smite-your-enemies” prayer – two days after a Minnesota state legislator was assassinated by a masked Trump-supporting Christian zealot stalking her and other Democratic lawmakers. Casualties included the legislator’s husband, also shot and killed, and another state legislator and his wife, both wounded. One wonders: Is the fact that Democratic state Sen. John Hoffman survived the attack proof God saved him to save America, as Trump has so often claimed of himself after a failed 2024 assassination attempt?

Ker’s notion of a fitting prayer for divisive times explains why I no longer pray during invocations at political events. Too many among us these days are willing to prostitute Christian faith for political ends, scoring one for the party in a self-righteous display of patriotism and religion rather than showcasing, say, the counsel of Jesus in the Gospels. Having lit the fuse, the retired Army colonel retreated to his seat, leaving the congressman and his staff to manage the rest of the town-hall meeting – now quarrelsome and unwieldy to the point of unruliness.

Robinson Mayor and car dealer Greg May tried resetting the tone in his own introductory remarks – “in Robinson we are completely laid back and we like to do things with respect and I expect that’s how we’re all going to act tonight” – but the meeting was arguably geared for animosity even without Ker’s prayer. Trump’s Make America Great Again juggernaut has long delighted in and thrived on cultivating hatred for fellow Americans of different political and cultural persuasions, consequently inviting in return more contempt, more hostility.

One marvels at the failure of event organizers to capitalize on the evening’s flag presentation to Robinson High School graduate Adrian Gage “Gonzo” Gonzales, 17, appointed to the U.S. Military Academy class of 2029 at West Point. Two months earlier, speaking at a campus ceremony, Gonzales, the lithe, muscular, ambitious son of Marine veteran Adrian Gonzales and longtime nurse Kendall Brewer, drew insightfully on history in explaining his resolve to serve his country after high school: “Now it’s time to move on to the next chapter, a chapter built on even higher standards, tougher challenges and greater purpose – to uphold the integrity of the Constitution of the United States.”

As the evening deteriorated, I wondered if Sessions’ staff shouldn’t have pressed Gonzo to lead the prayer or at least offer a few unifying words. His part was limited to a brief and forgettable walk-on.

Much of what followed indeed focused on veterans and the military – among the few elements of American society still regarded with some reverence, though how long this endures in the Age of Trump is debatable. Marine veteran Patrick Branyan, 77, who served with the celebrated 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, in Vietnam in 1967-68, questioned the congressman on President Trump’s ordering 700 members of his old battalion to quell citizen protests: “You know, as a Marine, I understand the mission of the Marines is not to control American crowds. Are you OK with this?”

“The Marines did nothing more than be there,” Sessions said in his typically wooden, syntax-challenged way to outraged jeers. “You know, it may not look good, but let me tell you what: It’s an embarrassment what those criminals were doing.”

This disparaging reference to Los Angeles protesters objecting to Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and what the protesters see as military occupation prompted more rancor in the hall. This included shouted references to the January 6, 2021, rioters who, following unsubstantiated and incendiary claims of an election rigged against President Trump, stormed the U.S. Capitol on his behalf and assaulted police officers seeking to defend lawmakers. These lawmakers included Sessions, ironically at the time among Republicans encouraging Trump’s election falsehoods. In the aftermath, Trump came to glorify these rioters and insurrectionists as patriots and martyrs, such as at his 2024 reelection campaign kickoff rally at Waco Regional Airport on March 25, 2023.

“Do you consider them [LA protesters] to be the enemy?” Branyan asked Sessions incredulously. “Because the job of the Marines is to kill the enemy. That’s the primary mission. Marines, we don’t shoot ’em in the legs.” This was a pointed reference to President Trump’s famously asking Trump Defense Secretary Mark Esper if armed military and police could shoot protesters in the legs amid demonstrations filling the streets of Washington after the murder of former Texan George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020. For the record, Trump denies this claim.

“Well, I don’t see them shoot anybody and they kept law and order,” Sessions replied dismissively, moving on into the evening’s crowd to take more constituent questions.

Left unaddressed by the congressman: legitimacy of the president’s use of military personnel to suppress political opposition, defying such laws as the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which right-wingers once championed. It prohibits military personnel from acting as a “posse comitatus” – that is, those “upon whom a sheriff could call for assistance in preventing any type of civil disorder.” There is also the problem of the president’s violating the Tenth Amendment and the principle of states' rights, which right-wingers also have championed, at least during Democratic presidential administrations.

Branyan’s fears – rooted (as he later told me) in recollections of the deadly 1970 Kent State shootings involving the Ohio National Guard and unarmed students protesting expansion of the Vietnam War in which he fought – were timely and relevant, perhaps more so than Branyan knew. In a June 15 social-media post to supporters (which I received as an email from the Trump White House), a day before the Sessions town-hall meeting, President Trump hinted at dark political motivations and personal grievances driving his nationwide immigrant deportation scheme, notwithstanding the usual administration rhetoric about law and order. In a grammatically untidy, let-it-all-hang-out message to followers, Trump betrayed simmering resentment over his 2020 electoral defeat:

ICE Officers are herewith ordered, by notice of this TRUTH, to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History. In order to achieve this, we must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside. These, and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections and grow the Welfare State, robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens. These Radical Left Democrats are sick of mind, hate our Country and actually want to destroy our Inner Cities — And they are doing a good job of it! There is something wrong with them. That is why they believe in Open Borders, Transgender for Everybody and Men playing in Women’s Sports — And that is why I want ICE, Border Patrol and our Great and Patriotic Law Enforcement Officers to FOCUS on our crime ridden and deadly Inner Cities, and those places where Sanctuary Cities play such a big role. You don’t hear about Sanctuary Cities in our Heartland!

"Yet," retired Army Staff Sgt. Aquilino Gonell, an immigrant and former Capitol Police officer who defended the Capitol from the Trump-inspired mob of January 6, 2021, said of Trump in a social-media post of his own, "he pardoned more the 1,500 violent criminals who attacked me and my colleagues."

This theme of use, abuse and misuse of U.S. military personnel continued. For instance, Janet Bagby, whose husband served in the Army and whose son is a Marine, highlighted Trump White House plans to fire tens of thousands of employees in the Department of Veterans Affairs. “With $45 million spent on the [Army] parade that occurred on Saturday,” she told the congressman, “there seems to be a disconnect between how we’re going to truly take care of our military and our veterans while saying we’re going to have cuts of 83,000 people in the VA.”

Before the congressman could respond, she inquired of reports that, because of a Trump executive order, “VA hospitals and dentists and other medical personnel now can legally choose to not treat a veteran who is identified as a Democrat or a veteran who is a female.” The constituent then sought Sessions’ help in restoring federal support for a program at colleges and universities – including Baylor University – to aid student veterans transition from a structured military framework to a robust academic environment.

For the record, the Trump administration did overreact in misguided deference to an executive order of Jan. 20 focused on men who “self-identify as women.” The administration consequently tweaked bylaws that forbid discrimination in veterans care “on the basis of race, age, color, sex, religion, national origin, politics, marital status or disability,” notably removing references to “national origin,” “politics” and “marital status.” However, Trump VA officials vigorously brand reports of allowances for discrimination in veterans care “false” and “ridiculous.”

In short, while some of my news brethren jumped the gun in conclusions about administrative changes in bylaws to (in the words of one news source) “allow VA doctors to refuse to treat Democrats, unmarried veterans,” the same appears true of White House staffers arguably trying to accommodate an executive order demanding “clear and accurate language and policies that recognize women are biologically female and men are biologically male.” Whatever, federal law still forbids discrimination in veterans' health care on the grounds of “national origin,” “politics” and “marital status.”

                                                          Unraveling the Trumpian knot

If Congressman Sessions sometimes seemed ignorant of constituent concerns, it’s possibly due to the blizzard of executive orders and declarations pursued by administration officials not only in occasional violation of federal law but without approval of Congress, the ultimate law-setting body under the U.S. Constitution (even as the Constitution itself is arguably undergoing constant reinterpretation by the nation’s highest court in such areas as presidential immunity). This is not to excuse Sessions from accountability, only to acknowledge the challenge of keeping up with Trump’s flood of directives, proclamations and utterances.

The alarming spectacle of immigration deportations – inflaming tensions nationwide as masked federal agents trample law and tradition in pursuit of immigrants legal and illegal in farm fields, at construction sites and on residential rooftops – contributed to Sessions’ being resoundingly booed after he claimed the Department of Veterans Affairs under President Biden had “moved $15 billion from veterans health care directly to the president so he could pay for these illegals to come to the United States, so what we’re doing is, in the [Trump-ordered] ‘big, beautiful bill,’ we are going to fix this.”

Well, that’s one version. Others credit the $15 billion shortfall to passage of the PACT Act, which provides medical care and disability compensation to hundreds of thousands of veterans diagnosed with diseases connected to toxic exposure from burn pits, radiation at weapons-testing sites and the aerial spraying of Agent Orange. Some also credit confusion over financial arrangements by the VA to help ICE officials process their payments to health-care providers treating immigrant detainees – a longtime practice that reportedly does not include funneling actual VA dollars for immigrant care.

When pressed by a veteran on Trump White House plans to cut some 80,000 jobs from the Department of Veterans Affairs, erasing staffing hikes by the Biden administration and undermining prompt, efficient service to veterans – this particular veteran described the VA health care he received as “outstanding” – Sessions in response retreated to the point he made earlier (to audience disbelief) in claiming, again, the VA had moved $15 billion in veterans’ health-care dollars to President Biden “to fund the immigration, the illegal immigration.”

As Sessions sought to make this claim, a woman kept heckling Sessions, prompting a man to finally shout: “Let the man talk!”

Sessions replied: “You know, you can yell at me on other issues, but not on the veterans issue. Please, if you listen, the issues that are related to community care [veterans’ health care beyond VA facilities] have been cut dramatically and, sir, I don’t know if you’re in community care or not, but they were cut dramatically. And the reason why is because the [VA] secretary moved $15 billion out of the VA and that is why last August we had to come in and do an emergency bill.” Sessions said lawmakers weren’t told last year where the money went but that “DOGE government efficiency” had since discovered the truth.

The congressman concluded by thanking the disgruntled veteran for his service.

Sessions’ damning claim has circulated in a distinctly different variation among at least some Republicans. Sen. Steve Daines, a Montana Republican, claimed in 2023 he had “just learned” VA resources were being “diverted from our nation’s veterans to process the medical claims of illegal immigrants held in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” though here the argument was that the time and efforts of VA claims processors would be better spent on veterans rather than helping ICE administrators care for immigrants in ICE custody.

The catch: While Sen. Daines may have only learned about this in 2023, the VA had been doing this since 2002 and the George W. Bush administration.

Again, Capitol Hill journalists and Biden VA officials last year explained the $15 billion shortfall in VA funding primarily resulted from record levels of benefits to veterans under the 2022 PACT Act, which expanded coverage to address exposure to toxic substances in military service – and which Sessions, in another exchange with a local veteran of 22 years’ service, volunteered he too supported. Since the PACT Act became law, more than 710,000 veterans have reportedly enrolled, obviously a significant hike in taxpayer expense.

A Sessions spokeswoman blames the massive shortfall on the “Biden administration’s intentional failure to request the correct amount of VA funding through their presidential budget request,” thus necessitating the supplemental appropriations to which Sessions referred. However, things here get murky. “Despite seeking more funds for government programs that provide free amenities to illegal aliens like FEMA’s Shelter Service program,” she told me, “the Biden administration failed to request the proper amount of funding for our veterans.”

Ergo, to again quote her, “Congressman Sessions’ statement refers to this clear show of motivation: the Biden administration cared more about illegal immigrants than our nation’s veterans.”

Mention of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s congressionally created Shelter and Services Program by a member of Sessions’ staff is ironic: Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign repeatedly made spurious claims that FEMA disaster relief funds due storm victims were instead lavished on immigrants – a lie even Republican governors in storm-ravaged states rebuffed. The FEMA Disaster Relief Fund and the FEMA Shelter and Services Program are legally distinct, separately appropriated and meticulously fulfill wholly different missions.

None of this excuses the Biden administration from its failure to decisively address immigration woes when it had congressional muscle to do so – something Trump has also failed to do via congressional action. However, to mischaracterize the VA’s processing of Immigration and Naturalization Enforcement dollars to health-care professionals as funneling money appropriated for veterans to help immigrant detainees ranks up there with Sessions’ echoing Trump’s “Stop the Steal” claims ahead of violence at the U.S. Capitol in January 2021.

A point worthy of reflection: Journalists, political scientists and everyday citizens are free to speculate on "intent" and "motivation" by Trump, Biden and Sessions, but we can never truly know what motivates a politician or anyone else to do something. The fact the Biden administration failed to properly budget for the Department of Veterans Affairs amid a sweeping expansion of benefits and health care for a multitude of veterans exposed to burn pits and other environmental hazards does not necessarily mean the administration "cared more about illegal immigrants than our nation’s veterans." It could simply mean the administration understandably failed to anticipate how many veterans might be impacted by the acknowledged problem of environmental hazards during military service.

Ironically, the Trump administration’s failure to effectively prioritize veterans health care only this week prompted it to retreat from plans to lay off 80,000 or so Department of Veterans Affairs employees after widespread outcry such as that heard at Sessions' town-hall meeting in Robinson. Even so, the VA has already shed 17,000 VA jobs since January – many held by veterans – and still plans to reach a total of 30,000 VA layoffs by the end of September, reportedly through attrition and various incentive packages.

The truth about the $15 billion shortfall in VA funding? Depends on whom you believe. But the fact the situation is complicated makes it easy for either side to spin to mislead for political ends.

                                                              Heckling the congressman

Many at the Sessions town-hall meeting seemed intent on heckling the congressman as he conducted a power-point presentation and dealt with questions. Others tested the patience of all by lapsing into rants. During one rambling question-turned-lecture, someone in the audience finally remarked wearily: "Is there a question in all this?" To be fair, the meeting was no more raucous than some of Sessions’ town-hall meetings during the Biden presidency except here many attending didn’t see Sessions as their advocate and reminded him of this regularly.

Such behavior shouldn't surprise. Today's town-hall meetings are spiritual descendants of colonial town-hall meetings held primarily in New England in 18th-century America and even earlier. Many of these functioned as a purer form of democracy with attendants participating in actual decisions of governance. Now shorn of governing powers involving direct democracy, today's town-hall meetings often prove occasions for constituents to vent in frustration, resentment and anger – and very often over presidential and national politics rather than the intensely local and regional issues that once defined them.

A 2022 Center for Effective Lawmaking study on town-hall meetings stressed that lawmaking and informed policymaking are more demanding than one might imagine. "But national policymaking is merely one component of the job description," Andrew J. Clarke of Lafayette College and Daniel Markovits of Columbia University argue. "Citizens also expect members of Congress to remain embedded in the political communities that propelled them to public office and opponents are eager to brand incumbents as distant lawmakers that have lost touch with local affairs."

Gerrymandering may help politicians win elections but it can consequently present difficulty for them in keeping up with constituent concerns and volatile sentiments in wildly drawn congressional districts, particularly given the sustained, almost daily influence that party leaders, oligarchs and lobbyists have over lawmakers versus the pull of everyday citizens back on the home front. A 2014 study probing some 2,000 policy cases over 20 years found “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

Propaganda operations masquerading as legitimate news operations; politicians employing conspiracy theories and outright deceit to pander to willfully uninformed masses; relaxed social-media policies paving the way for more falsehoods and more exaggerations, insatiably lapped up by those seeking to bolster creaky narratives justifying grievances; and, finally, the dwindling relevance of daily newspapers of record and a constituency that no longer keeps up with factually grounded news the way their parents and grandparents did only complicate matters. And the results of all this can come to a head during town-hall meetings.

Example from the Sessions town-hall meeting: The outraged mother of an autistic child, reminding the congressman of his own son's Down syndrome, questioned his support of an "autism registry" to track Americans suffering autism spectrum disorder. The initiative was reportedly pursued on the orders of controversial Trump-appointed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an infamous vaccine critic who has touted a widely discredited but stubbornly held theory that routine childhood shots can cause autism, a disorder that can inhibit development of the brain and influence one's ability to effectively socialize with others.

"How can you back a proposal that relies on debunked science and perpetuates harmful myths about vaccines and autism?" the mother asked angrily, her question laced with cynicism about RFK's intentions as well as those of Trump, who has belatedly argued vaccines might indeed cause autism, despite decades of research countering any such a link. "Where are the ethical and scientific guardrails to ensure this initiative does not hurt or harm the very people it claims to help? What safeguards will you put in place to protect the privacy of those impacted by RFK Jr.'s national autism registry?"

The congressman's response: "I don't know what you're talking about."

Sessions asked if this had been voted upon in Congress. Of course it hadn't. It was yet another extralegal romp in fantasyland by the Trump administration -- one with which Sessions should have nonetheless been acquainted.

Label it a perfect storm: National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya on April 21 discusses a registry to "track Americans with autism" as part of an initiative "requested by the president to Secretary Kennedy," only for this to be dismissed as inaccurate on April 24 by a Trump HHS official, only for the NIH and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services on May 7 to announce a "partnership" to focus on the root causes of autism spectrum disorder by mining data from Medicare and Medicaid enrollees diagnosed with ASD, complete with Secretary Kennedy's blessing – this time for real, apparently. Mix in RFK Jr.’s past claims about childhood vaccines with Trump's statements and record of spreading falsehoods and authoritarian leanings and one can see why scientifically grounded parents might well suspect the Trump administration's intentions and how it might misuse sensitive medical information, all sufficient to conjure up a conspiracy theory about an intrusive "autism registry" ironically running counter to the old conspiracy chestnut about childhood vaccines causing autism, all set against the embarrassment of bungled administrative messaging against an even broader backdrop of conspiracy hoaxes about COVID-19 and anger over at least some compulsory vaccinations imagined by the Biden administration to combat a deadly pandemic. For the record, the idea of compulsory vaccinations contributed to uproar aplenty at a Sessions town-hall meeting in Waco in November 2021.

Sessions, who by this late point at his June 16 town-hall meeting seemed trapped in the role of babe in the woods, confessed of the unveiling of RFK's plan to build a real-world data platform enabling advanced research across claims data, medical records and consumer wearables: "I have not seen his proposal."

Such constituent confusion, cynicism and impatience was evident throughout the evening. When a woman suggested Sessions and fellow Republicans sought to cut Medicare in the deficit-swelling, debt-busting “big, beautiful bill” assembled primarily to cut taxes of billionaires and fund more immigrant removals, yet continued talking over the congressman’s reply, someone finally yelled: “Listen to the answer!” Apparently flustered, Sessions said: “Listen, I will be pleased to come back after we do this [pass the bill] and would love to have you come back and tell me how we cut you, because we won’t.”

A man then hollered at the lawmaker: “We’ll see!” Sessions replied: “We will see.”

                                                           Evading the question

However appropriate or inappropriate the evening’s boos and heckling, the congressman did himself no favors by sometimes evading questions. Example: When 41-year-old information technology specialist Anthony Hollister asked what Sessions and other lawmakers were doing about the Trump administration’s ignoring or delaying responding to federal court orders, including a “unanimous vote of the Supreme Court, the top court in this land,” Sessions dodged with such infuriating obfuscations as how his late father had been a federal district judge and how he himself believes in rule of law.

Did the congressman not understand the question put to him? At one point, Sessions retreated to the answer he gave to an earlier question about due process rights afforded by law to every person in the United States, citizen or not. Sessions stated that “I believe that they [immigrant defendants] are entitled to receive due process, but if they fail to show up to initiate that [in court], they’ve excused themselves” of such rights. But this ignored Hollister’s question. The question at hand dealt with administration contempt for and defiance of federal courts.

Pressed further on what Sessions and other lawmakers would do to safeguard longstanding constitutional checks and balances from a presidential administration’s ignoring or delaying complying with an order from even the Supreme Court of the United States, Sessions finally asked Hollister pointedly: “Which case is that?” When Hollister admitted he didn’t know the specific case name, Sessions snapped, “I don’t either,” then abruptly handed the microphone to another constituent to ask another question.

For the record, the high court order upheld a lower court order to facilitate the return of an immigrant with legal status erroneously deported by the Trump administration to a foreign gulag. Ignorance of the specific case name – Noem v. Abrego Garcia – was an indisputable dodge. As a lawmaker sworn to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States,” Sessions didn’t need to know the case name to know of the administration’s well-publicized defiance of the high court and the grave risks to the nation in a president who ignores the rule of law.

Nor did Sessions reveal to constituents, let alone explain, his May 22 vote, as part of Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” to neuter the power of federal district judges like his father. House Republicans inserted into the bill a provision largely restricting district judges to injunctions impacting only parties before their individual courts rather than applying injunctive relief nationally. Although this provision was stricken from the final bill, the Supreme Court of the United States has since reined in most (though not all) such “universal injunctions.”

“The federal judiciary is highly partisan, a reality shaped over time through the interpretation and exercise of Article III powers,” a Sessions spokeswoman explained to me after the town-hall meeting. “Congressman Sessions has supported efforts to limit the use of nationwide injunctions and restore balance to the separation of powers. Just as a member of Congress represents a specific district rather than the entire nation, a federal judge should issue rulings within their jurisdiction and not [legislate] nationwide policy from the bench.”

For the record, amid criticism for failing to promptly respond to the April 10 Supreme Court order, the Trump administration in June returned legal immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States to face charges that he "conspired to bring undocumented aliens to the United States from countries such as Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Ecuador and elsewhere, ultimately passing through Mexico before crossing into Texas." His family this month cited his case as proof of a "profound constitutional crisis in which executive agencies have repeatedly and deliberately flouted the authority of multiple federal courts, including the Supreme Court itself.”

Hollister, who lives in the eastern part of the 17th Congressional District between Crockett and Lufkin, acknowledged afterward that he should have better educated himself in questioning the congressman about the Supreme Court decision Noem v. Abrego Garcia. "I was ill-prepared in that I didn't have that piece of information. That's bad on me for not being better-prepared. But as a U.S. congressperson, it's his job to know such things that are controversial to the people he represents."

Immigration detentions and deportations figured in much of the town-hall dissension, ranging from the protests in Los Angeles, to the supposed misappropriation of VA funds, to ongoing executive-judicial clashes. Blake Burleson, co-founder of the Heart of Texas Network for Immigrant Rights, which supports local immigration advocacy groups, lobbies politicians and ferries immigrants to doctors, schools and attorneys, told me afterward that the congressman seemed oblivious to controversial ICE raids thus far. "Sessions implied that ICE is only targeting the undocumented who are criminals," Burleson said, adding that the lawmaker surely must be aware of situations in San Antonio “where ICE agents are going to the courthouse and arresting immigrants whose cases are dismissed.”

                                                                Reality-TV America

If constituents of the 17th Congressional District left the Sessions town-hall meeting unfulfilled, it may have been as much because of their failings as the congressman’s dodging accountability and being unable to keep up with Trump’s daily reality-TV obsession with provoking uproar and division. “As long as the people representing us with the microphone believe measles vaccinations are one of the most critical issues facing the country, we are toast,” a friend observed afterward. “Another woman went on and on about short-selling stock. I don’t have the foggiest idea what she was talking about.”

Equally bewildering: the ideological incoherence on parade. Sessions quite understandably championed construction in and near his congressional district of Samsung’s major semiconductor manufacturing facility – spurred along by the CHIPS and Science Act mostly passed by Democratic lawmakers in 2022 and signed into law by President Biden to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to the United States. At the town-hall meeting, Sessions smartly hailed the Samsung facility as “a manufacturing plant of the future.”

The Taylor-based fabrication plant, part of the largest foreign direct investment in Texas history, will produce advanced logic chips for 5G, high-performance computing and artificial intelligence purposes. Following a $6.4 billion investment by the $53 billion CHIPS and Science Act, Samsung boosted its overall investment of $17 billion to $40 billion, potentially yielding some 20,000 jobs. Yet Sessions not only voted against the CHIPS and Science Act, but President Trump has proposed gutting the act and using its congressionally appropriated funds to pay down federal debt.

“Congressman Sessions supports incentives for domestic semiconductor manufacturing,” his policy spokeswoman informed me later. “However, he stands by his original vote against the CHIPS Act of 2022, as he remains concerned about the excessive bureaucracy, lack of fiscal safeguards and long-term inefficiencies in the legislation. Regarding any future proposals to repeal or redirect CHIPS funding, the congressman would need to see the specific details before commenting.”

This guarded assessment certainly counters the soaring rhetoric of Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott who, on June 7, 2024, saluted the Samsung expansion with a ribbon-cutting ceremony marking construction of the $16.6 million Samsung Highway in Taylor. "Texas is more dedicated than ever to the future of chips and Samsung in our great state,” Abbott said in addressing 125 business and community leaders gathered. “We are proud that the chips that run our future will be 'Made in Texas' by Samsung for generations to come.”

More ideological incoherence? Sure. Sessions, who by all appearances has taken to his 2025 role in co-chairing the Delivering Outstanding Government Efficiency Caucus – neatly complementing Trump's backer-of-backer, eccentric billionaire and SpaceX visionary Elon Musk’s DOGE chainsawing of the federal budget – seemed unfazed by Musk’s subsequent condemnation as a “disgusting abomination” Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” with tax cuts for everybody and billions of dollars more for ramped-up immigrant deportations and detentions, even as Sessions too lamented the bill’s runaway spending and trillions in debt (for which he nonetheless voted – twice  by the Fourth of July). During his town-hall meeting, he talked of cost-cutting Medicaid reforms, even as President Trump continued to insist Medicaid would remain untouched.

Huh?

Musk, the impulsive South African-turned-Californian-turned-Texan whose SpaceX rocket-testing facility in nearby McGregor continues to shake area homes as he dreams of “direct democracy” on Mars one day, seems to have filled the void left by tea-party patriots who once vehemently protested such rampant spending – and whose absence at the Sessions town-hall meeting suggests either their lack of relevance today or their surrendering fiscally responsible principles to all-consuming Make America Great Again passions. To quote a recent social-media post from Musk: "What’s the point of DOGE if the government’s just going to add $5 trillion more in debt?"

It’s only my estimate, but of the 200 or so attending the Sessions town-hall meeting, roughly two-thirds consisted of skeptics if not outright cynics of Trump’s policies – a switch from the Republicans and MAGA disciples who dominated and enlivened such meetings during the Biden presidency. Those who supported Trump resisted the notion to rise and defend him on June 16, possibly because his off-the-cuff statements and controversial policies aren’t easily championed before neighbors, especially given that these increasingly clash with old-time conservative principles.

That made a key exception to this town-hall sentiment all the more memorable.

“I just want you to know, Donald Trump ran [for president] perfectly clear on what he was going to do on immigration, on taxes, on the economy,” one constituent told Sessions, by now feeling the heat in the hall. “He won a big mandate. And I want you to know, anybody can pack a small-town hall, anybody can. But you’re on the right side, Donald Trump’s on the right side [boos, jeers]. We are in the majority of the American people. We want immigration under control, we want taxes under control and we want law and order. That’s what he ran on.”

He’s right. Polls show broad support for Trump’s priorities of immigration, taxes, law and order. But this support crumbles given how the president is pursuing these priorities. Americans don’t like masked federal agents roughing up citizens or immigrants with legal status. They don’t like risking health care and going further into unsustainable federal debt just to keep tax cuts for billionaires. And they recognize that an administration allowed to defy federal courts bodes ill for law and order if administrations of other political persuasions can then do the same.

At one point, in seeking to establish that elections have consequences, Sessions argued that because Trump in 2024 won 4 million more votes than those for all Republican congressional candidates combined, Americans owed him a certain deference. “He sold thoughts and ideas – and, so, in my opinion, he deserves, just like President Obama did, just like President Biden did – to have a say on the way that they would choose to govern,” Sessions argued. “And that is what we’re a part of right now.”

He’s right too. Yet does such deference allow a president to defy courts and argue for executive powers that clash with the Constitution and Congress’s own constitutionally spelled-out responsibilities? That’s also where we are today.

One senses, too, a widening disconnect between those elected to office on man-of-the-people rhetoric who then fall prey to party dogma and oligarchs versus constituents who meanwhile contend with housing, commodity and fuel costs. May 2025 figures indicated a clear weakening in consumer spending and hikes in food and energy costs – obviously more hurtful to those among us of limited means. A constituent citing Waco’s steep poverty rate of 25 percent broached the idea of hiking the federal minimum wage of $7.25 or regulating rents, to which Sessions replied: "We are a free society. This is not socialist.”

Yet the very definition of socialism is mutating fast in the Age of Trump. At the time of Sessions’ town-hall meeting, news organizations were reporting that President Trump (and his successors) would now have a controlling interest in U.S. Steel under new Japanese ownership, allowing the president to have say over the company’s transferring of production or jobs beyond the United States or any closing of individual plants, all of which would seem to violate previous long-held Republican principles of robust capitalism free of federal encroachment. And yet Trump and his proxies have spent years attacking Democrats and liberals as “socialists.”

During an exchange on the Samsung fabrication plant in which he encouraged the pursuit of jobs such as electrician and welder, Sessions correctly touted the good pay and benefits of jobs at H-E-B and McDonald's, only for a constituent to explain that money earned and simple math simply didn’t add up to a reliably “livable wage.” At one point, Sessions cited liberal Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: "She worked at the greatest bar in New York and they raised the price of minimum wage and the bar closed." Someone countered: "That's called corporate greed!"

Sessions fired back: "It's called ‘they-couldn't-make-a-go-of-it.’”

This disconnect also figured in constituent concern over cuts of several thousand Social Security personnel. As one constituent noted, not all seniors are knowledgeable about applying online for benefits "and now with new regulations, they're going to have to." Sessions dismissed this concern by noting that many government personnel are returning to work after staying home under pandemic policies. He expressed confidence seniors could still contact Social Security by phone. He’s right, though this is only due to a Trump administration policy reversal amid huge public outcry. Social Security Administration response times have reportedly worsened, too.

When yet another constituent questioned congressional discussion over Americans working till age 70 – a distinct possibility if not likelihood given that the eagle-eyed nonpartisan, nonprofit Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates Trump’s tax-cut bill will accelerate Social Security and Medicare insolvency by a year, to 2032 – Sessions simply replied to this admittedly vague, poorly worded citizen inquiry: "I hope you work as long as you want to. I'm 70." Then the congressman moved to another question.

                                                               Still fighting over 2020

Confounding town-hall tensions was the president’s feverish obsession with insisting, up and down, that he won the 2020 election when courts nationwide found no evidence of significant election fraud, let alone legal standing to challenge how individual states manage their elections. At one point, Sessions squirmed to evade answering a constituent who asked if he was at last “coming on the record and saying the 2020 election was legitimately won by Joe Biden.” Sessions’ reply: “What I would say to you is you’re the only person in America who is asking that question because it is very old news.”

Old news? Hardly. How can the congressman indignantly insist to a constituent that “you’re the only person in America who is asking that question” when, days earlier at Fort Bragg, Trump insisted “the [2020] election was rigged and stolen” to the applause of U.S. soldiers? Clearly the president of the United States is keeping the “question” very much alive. Shortly after his 2025 inauguration, in victory comments in Emancipation Hall at the Capitol, Trump referred to the 2020 election as “totally rigged.”

The question of the 2020 election remains alive also because of Sessions’ own misjudgments: posing with “Stop the Steal” protesters outside the Capitol for his Facebook page days before violence erupted; voting to block election results; and giving credence, during a May 14, 2022, town-hall meeting at West Community Center, to the now-thoroughly debunked “2000 Mules,” a “documentary” claiming massive conspiracy by Democrats to steal the 2020 election. The film has since been disowned by the conservative media company that distributed it.

No wonder. A damning lawsuit against the company (Salem Media), pro-Trump conspiracy theorist and producer Dinesh D’Souza (earlier convicted of campaign finance fraud) and right-wing, Texas-based True the Vote argues they collectively employed “junk pseudoscience and excerpted surveillance video of innocent voters” to malign a Georgia voter whom the “defendants falsely accused of ballot fraud in their multi-million dollar-grossing film.” Only after the 2024 election was won by Trump did D’Souza formally apologize to the defamed Georgian who filed the lawsuit. Interestingly, D’Souza himself has blamed the documentary's falsehoods on True the Vote's supposed researchers.

One could well argue the popular film constituted fraud in the 2024 election that Trump won.

Nor has Trump’s pardoning of January 6 insurrectionists and rioters after his 2025 inauguration helped put all the controversy to rest. Days after Sessions’ town-hall meeting in Robinson, Trump declared on Truth Social that “Biden was grossly incompetent and the 2020 election was a total FRAUD!” and that “A Special Prosecutor must be appointed.” Trump added: “Let the work begin!” Which, one might add, conflicts with Trump’s vow in a December 2024 “Meet the Press” interview that he would not seek to initiate such an investigation.

One of many lawsuits alleging sufficient improprieties nationwide to set aside the 2020 election, Latinos for Trump v. Sessions, filed in Waco’s own federal court, argued in its Jan. 18, 2021, filing that “every member of [the] currently seated 117th U.S. Congress and the president-elect, who is scheduled to be sworn in this coming Wednesday, January 20th, were not legitimately elected because the People of the United States were given ballots that were patently illegal.” Filed by a January 6 protester, the lawsuit demonstrates how far the cries of election wrongdoing can go.

Is all this another instance of Congressman Sessions being uninformed? Out of touch? Unwilling to acknowledge the embarrassments and obsessions and transgressions on his side of the aisle? In any case, constituents in the hall on June 16 hooted down the congressman after he seemed to evade the question demanding his formal acknowledgement of Biden’s legitimate election till he finally exclaimed under pressure: "I told you! He’s elected!” Even so, Sessions dismissed any notion he was an election denier, indignantly claiming such criticism was “unfair” and that he was "stunned and surprised" at the allegation.

                                                                Defining moments

One of the evening’s defining moments came when longtime activist Pam Kelly, 77, of Marlin, was given the microphone to ask a question layered with bitter context about not just the Republican Party but an electorate that endorsed it through the 2024 election, handing the party control of both chambers of Congress as well as the presidency under a supreme court perceived by many as beholden to or truly fearful of Trump. Her scathing question bears repeating here in full:

I have one question, but I’d like to preface it with something if that’s OK. You’re a few years younger than me, but we basically are of the same era, the same societal standards. I remember a time when neighbors were helpful, caring. People respected the rule of law, our constitution and cared about family and the Founding Fathers. Americans loved America and what she stood for. When World War II broke out, most of our fathers went off to fight fascism in a country far away because they believed in freedom and democracy for everyone. My father was a captain in the United States Army.

I think that the men and women in the Greatest Generation would never believe that a major political party in America would follow a leader who lies, cheats, is disrespectful of women [applause], punishes the poor, makes fun of handicapped people, courts enemies of a free people, believes the treasure of our federal lands should be used for profit, invades our most private information, uses his position to enhance and enrich himself and his family [more applause], believes he is above the law, believes the Constitution should be changed to accommodate him, creates a partisan judicial system, takes revenge on those who disagree with him and who divides his own citizens through fear and hate.

I have supported Republicans as many times as I have Democrats, but right now the entire political system is dangerously sick. I just have one question: What happened to the integrity of the Republican Party? [Cheers, applause break out.]

To this, the congressman passed on a marvelous opportunity to explain why MAGA principles are sufficiently compelling to shelve traditional principles once defining American conservativism. Instead, he dodged, citing Democratic President Bill Clinton’s losing his law license (well, suspended) for lying under oath and Democratic President Biden’s supposedly using executive influence to hide dissolute son Hunter Biden’s use of crack cocaine at the White House (an allegation never proven). Loud boos erupted. So much for this searing question.

“I’ll be honest,” Kelly told me later of her question to the congressman and his response. “I think the man has to know that I was speaking the truth. I have trouble believing anyone of our generation could grow up in Texas and not have that kind of integrity. When I was looking at him, he was looking right back at me. I think he just couldn’t answer the question so the answer he did give was, well, very juvenile. I saw no point in arguing with him. I mean, I don’t like pulling someone’s pants down. But I think so many people do wonder about all this.”

Even when given a chance to answer a fairly genial, softball question with explanations of how MAGA or America First or Project 2025 or the Department of Government Efficiency might improve the lives of everyday, ordinary Americans, Sessions whiffed. Example: when busy, upbeat, 63-year-old community organizer Ashley Bean Thornton – who has contributed in all sorts of roll-up-your-sleeves ways to everything from battling local poverty to improving public education – asked the congressman a question that might have inspired a rousing flight of oratory from an earlier generation of politician.

“One of the things that the government has done throughout my memory of history is make wise investments in our country – you know, from [President] Eisenhower’s investing in the [interstate] highways, all the way up to President Biden investing in the CHIPS Act that is helping to pay for that Samsung [plant] you mentioned,” Thornton said. “So, to kind of steer the conversation away [from more contentious town-hall discussions involving DOGE and budget cuts], just a little bit, what is the vision for investment coming forward?”

Sessions resisted this challenge to champion the Trump agenda, instead giving a disheartening view of America as bankrupt and heavily reliant on overseas investment:

The view with investment is that we have found ourselves as being less of a good thing to bet on, that the federal government is nearing a point where we can’t pay our bill. And there are other things that are called crypto and gold and bricks and a lot of other things that have gathered a lot of investment dollars. And that is why President Trump went overseas to get $6 trillion that will be invested in this country – $6 trillion will fund and fuel a lot of investment not for the government but for jobs and people for things you see here in Waco, Texas. They’re investing in jobs here in our country. The $6 trillion is a guarantee they will invest in this country in our companies and in the investments that go on. And you should expect that a lot of corporate interest is how we employ people.

While Thornton later acknowledged being confused by Sessions’ answer, she understood at least some of his concerns. “I think we need some balance of cutting, taxing people who (IMHO) would be no worse off for paying lots more taxes, and investing in our capacity to educate our people, do groundbreaking research and invent and build new things,” she told me. “I think that kind of investment has paid off through the years. I think it’s great if other folks [overseas] want to invest in us, but I don't think it does the same for us as investing in ourselves.”

Other exchanges between the congressman and skeptical constituents on June 16 invite commentary, but they’re similar enough in tenor and illustration. Did Sessions deserve all the mocking remarks and hooted ridicule that evening? Possibly, though it was nowhere near as vitriolic as what I witnessed from the right-wing extremists dominating his town-hall meeting in Waco in November 2021, including a rant from one constituent who wanted President Biden, not even a year into his term, put on trial for various perceived offenses, Nuremberg-style.

                                                          Sovereignty of the people?

Constituent perspectives on the town-hall meeting vary widely. A friend with a strong corporate background who is acutely aware of public policy left “disappointed and dispirited” – sentiments he acknowledged were probably inevitable “since the other side had complete control over the venue and agenda. But I devoutly hoped we’d land a punch or two during the Q&A. We didn’t. Not one.” Yet two political activists contend that Sessions’ local critics “owned the room,” even as they acknowledged that “Sessions did an excellent job of standing there and taking the hit.”

The congressman indeed won praise from critics for mounting a town-hall meeting after the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee in March discouraged Republican House members from holding such events, given widespread outrage over Trump’s actions. Sessions also won plaudits for declining efforts by his staff to end questions early from constituents. He took all comers till every question in the hall had been asked. Still, one wonders how the town-hall meeting might have unfolded had he and his staff more earnestly heeded Baylor-trained social worker AB Waters’ advice.

“I want to preface the importance of understanding what this town hall actually is,” Waters told Sessions after pressing him and other lawmakers to help society’s less fortunate. “It is not a time for you to come and tell us your agenda. We already know your agenda. And that’s what you were elected for. You’re doing your job and I appreciate it. But for the next town hall, I think it may be important to hear and give time for your constituents to speak with you. And I know that you’re over time and I really appreciate your just staying and taking our questions.”

Someone blurted out: “We spoke last November!”

“That’s great, that’s awesome,” Waters replied. “And here we are again because town halls are important, right?”

"Town-halls are a two-way street," Sessions said.

"They are a two-way street, thank you," Waters said. "It's a place for constituents to voice their opinions, to voice where they're coming from, to share their story, and sometimes those stories are not always nice and wonderful because they come from pain and they come from struggle."

Waters' advice reminds me of U.S. Sen. Paul Simon's deep faith in the institution of town-hall meetings. Over two terms in the Senate, the Democratic lawmaker held town-hall meetings in every county of Illinois at least twice and in almost all of the wards and townships of Cook County – reportedly more than 600 meetings. "I did it both for political purposes, obviously exposing my views to many who would never come to a Democratic political rally, and for philosophical reasons," he later wrote. "I wanted to make sure that people who are unemployed or facing a huge hospital bill had access to their senator, and not simply the big contributors or those who could afford a trip to Washington."

Over time, he forged best practices to improve how such events unfolded. These included tapping a respected, notably non-partisan community leader to strongly moderate the proceedings, outlining procedural guidelines and setting the tone for a respectful, civil discussion. Simon suggested the policymaker "give a brief opening statement of no more than ten minutes," thus allowing the vast majority of time for questions and comments from the audience. By contrast, Sessions' presentation took up the best part of an hour before questions were invited. By then his brittle speaking style, lack of context and creaky policy arguments had built up the resentment of constituents who had gathered from all over the congressional district to sound off.

Problem: Simon by all accounts approached town-hall meetings as "listening and learning sessions," which possibly made the former newspaperman, veteran and civil rights advocate a unique senator. And Sessions? Judging from his general defensiveness to the point of brusqueness when ideologically or factually cornered and given the context of his long career in Congress, he appeared more of a political puppet, dancing awkwardly to tunes set by whatever forces happen to dominate his party rather than showing any real leadership or individuality. On June 16 he showed little willingness to find ways to reach more skeptical constituents or incorporate their concerns into his policymaking. To a degree, he has arguably devolved over time from a George W. Bush compassionate conservative to a fiscally driven tea-party Republican to, finally, a Make America Great Again apologist who reality is a Republican in name only.    

Branyan, who had expressed reservations about his old Marine battalion ordered by the president to face down protesters in Los Angeles, did give Sessions his due: “He didn't actually answer my question, but I will say this. My wife and I stayed till it was over and went up and shook his hand for staying there through the question-and-answer period till everybody got a question answered. I think that's kind of unique today for Republicans because their policies are so unpopular that if they do a town-hall like Sessions did, there's going to be a lot of resistance.”

Kelly also gave Sessions credit, though to no good end. "There were more people who were ticked off than he had supporters,” she observed in hindsight. “Good for him for holding out and not walking away from it. I mean, people bordered on being rude and hostile and he stayed. Did it do any good? No. He's continued supporting Trump since then [most notably by voting for Trump's "big, beautiful bill"] and these are people in Congress who could actually do something about all this. They could say, ‘We're not going to let you take any more power away from us’ or ‘We're going to protect and defend the Constitution’ or ‘No, we're going to stick up for our constituents.’

"I really feel like the people in Congress could take back control," she told me, "but it's either fine with them what's now going on or they're spineless, neither of which deserves any respect."

Louise Champagne, a constituent who questioned Sessions on why, amidst all the claims and allegations by Musk and Trump of widespread government fraud, no criminal indictments of fraud have surfaced, acknowledged disappointment in the congressman's responses generally: "I mean, his answers during the town-hall meeting were things like, 'Sure, it's fine, everybody should work until they're 70' and 'Oh, Waco has a 28 percent poverty rate? Well, people should go work at H-E-B and McDonald's,' as if the working poor aren't already working at places like H-E-B and McDonald's. He seemed completely unsympathetic to that."

His town-hall answer to Champagne's question on the lack of criminal indictments arising from constant claims of government fraud, no doubt figuring into Trump’s constant characterizing government rank-and-file employees as part of some corrupt, ill-defined “deep state” worthy of dissolution and restocking with Trump loyalists: "Oh, don't worry, that's getting ready to happen!"

One marvels at the questions not pressed, including about DOGE-inspired targeting of a federal grant for Mission Waco's innovative Creekside Community Village "tiny houses" project to address homelessness – such projects were supposedly a major concern to America First critics of U.S. funding of Ukrainian resistance – and the fate of a prominent, longtime Waco restaurateur whose disappearance from city life because of “immigration circumstances” remains, at least to a degree, a local mystery.

Nor did anyone air specific concern about looming Medicaid cutbacks impacting (through more red tape and more bureaucratic hurdles) Waco Family Medicine and its mission of treating thousands of medically underserved Central Texans. Established in 1969 by the McLennan County Medical Society to address a doctor shortage and a lack of primary-care access for the poor, Waco Family Medicine this year has already experienced personnel cuts of 7 percent and clinic closures due to rising health-care costs amid tightened, state-ordered Medicaid restrictions. (Medicaid, of course, has long covered low-income adults and children through state-federal heath-care partnerships.)

One wonders if any town-hall meeting could have gone off well in the Age of Trump. It not only challenges and upends almost daily how many envision America but seems to encourage confrontation between citizens. Many Americans are increasingly ignorant or contemptuous of founding principles as well as disoriented to the point of resignation and capitulation by dizzying, high-stakes, sleight-of-hand shell games involving whataboutism, conspiracy theories and “truth-isn’t-truth” alternative realities, hatched daily by Trump, his designates and a supine Republican Party pandering to MAGA zealots while dismissing others as “snowflakes,” "RINOs" (old-fashioned Republicans who resolutely rejected dutiful MAGA conversion) and, of course, liberals. The libertarian Cato Institute’s Fourth of July 2025 survey of more than 2,000 Americans found "shocking ignorance" about our nation’s history and system of government: "Majorities of Americans don’t know why the American colonies adopted the Declaration of Independence to separate from Britain on July 4, 1776 (53 percent), or that only Congress can declare war (54 percent), or that the Supreme Court has final say over presidential actions (54 percent)."

More disturbingly, the survey, conducted in June, showed vast majorities fretting over faltering efforts to keep the government’s budget and finances sustainable (amidst a massive tax-cut bill then poised to add trillions to federal indebtedness); preventing excessive government power (clearly evident in a turbocharged Trump presidency); ensuring ordinary people have “a real voice in how the country is run” (mirrored in not only Sessions’ rebellious town-hall meeting but others across America, including one in Georgia where some constituents were tased to the approval of Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Sessions colleague who meanwhile has effectively destroyed congressional decorum while heading a new, DOGE-oriented congressional subcommittee aimed at eliminating government waste); the spectacle of political and cultural disputes spiraling into more violence (evident in events ranging from summer 2020 protests over police violence to January 6 mob violence at the Capitol). Two more priorities overwhelmingly favored in the survey: protecting future generations from environmental harm and providing "equal justice under the law," the latter arguably threatened by the Supreme Court's restraint of universal injunctions imposed, however temporarily and selectively, by lower federal courts.

To Sessions' credit, Robinson police officers in the hall were never pressed to remove or suppress any of the congressman's constituents.

In his remarks during a Robinson High School ceremony in April, West Point appointee Gage Gonzales quoted Theodore Roosevelt from a 1910 speech given at the Sorbonne in Paris: “It is not the critic who counts; the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood." (This was an abridged version of the Roosevelt quote.) One might unthinkingly apply this to public servants such as Congressman Sessions, though Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville in his towering political travelogue "Democracy in America" (1835) applied such arena roles far more broadly:

In America, the principle of the sovereignty of the people is neither barren nor concealed as it is with some other nations; it is recognized by the customs and proclaimed by the laws; it spreads freely and arrives without impediment at its most remote consequences. If there be a country in the world where the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people can be fairly appreciated, where it can be studied in its application to the affairs of society and where its dangers and its advantages may be foreseen, that country is assuredly America.

Even Roosevelt acknowledged as much in the role of the overlooked, undistinguished individual U.S. citizen, judging from yet another passage in his famous “Man in the Arena” speech, actually entitled “Citizenship in a Republic” for the benefit of his French audience:

The good citizen will demand liberty for himself and, as a matter of pride, he will see to it that others receive liberty which he thus claims as his own. Probably the best test of true love of liberty in any country is the way in which minorities are treated in that country. Not only should there be complete liberty in matters of religion and opinion but complete liberty for each man to lead his life as he desires, provided only that in so doing he does not wrong his neighbor.

To quote a memorable passage from New York Times coverage of the speech, delivered in French: "In a republic," said Mr. Roosevelt at one point, "the quality of the ruler is all important, but" – here a telling pause – "we are the rulers."

Certainly, the Sessions town-hall meeting of June 16 was primed for fireworks, showcasing two distinct sets of Americans: citizens who defend constitutional checks and balances to ensure the rights of all are protected from a constitutionally contemptuous king in all but title versus citizens more trusting in God, guns and hierarchy and weary of the constitutional safeguards they see as prostituted over the generations to protect those whom the Founders never imagined worthy of constitutional carveouts and concessions.

With the countdown underway to the 250th anniversary of America’s founding, Americans are clearly suffering an identity crisis, arguably sufficient to contribute to our nation’s decline and fall unless citizens – including their elected representatives – become far more cognizant of the duties and responsibilities that come with the hard-won sovereignty of the people.

Tuesday, May 20, 2025

Democracy afoot in the neighborhood

"Action Jackson" visits the Waco Tribune-Herald newsroom on New Year's Day 2018

Ann and I very seldom post on social media about our private lives. However, almost all of our friends in my Central Texas neighborhood know me only in the company of our miniature, 23-pound white poodle Jackson, ever-friendly, always game for new outings and new encounters. To our overwhelming grief, Jackson crossed quietly into another, more merciful existence one day in May 2025 after bolstering our lives on a daily, often hourly basis since December 2013. That’s when Ann, to my surprise, brought Jackson into our home from Fuzzy Friends Rescue of Central Texas on a two-day trial basis.

He had been found wandering alone, apparently abandoned, in the nearby town of Robinson.

What was supposed to be a temporary stay at our home for a night or so became a lively, life-imbuing, life-affirming lifestyle for us and all who enjoyed our hospitality and company. When Ann – done with being “dogless” after more than a year – introduced me to Jackson upon my return from work one December day as opinion editor at the Waco Tribune-Herald, he sat on the sofa alongside her, already to my mind confident of being in charge of all that lay before him. In the Fuzzy Friends newspaper ad pleading his adoption, he was dubbed “Ivan the Adorable,” though this was a compromise after one of the rescue workers initially suggested "Reptar," the name of a fictional Tyrannosaurus rex inspired by Godzilla and featured in the cartoon series "Rugrats." (“I am Reptar! Hear me roar!”) In our home, he initially struck me as a bit presumptuous for a supposedly unwanted or stray dog needing shelter and care. Yet, over time, Jackson became my virtual shadow – fiercely independent-minded, yet dogging my heels, probably because I fed and walked him. The latter pursuit quickly became an absolute passion for him, to the degree that even near the end, years later, he continued to jump up madly but joyfully whenever I reached for his leash by the front door. We walked twice a day, strolls that often amounted to a mile and a half each, generally at his instigation when I might well have preferred shorter routes and a return to the comforts of home and hearth. He certainly aided my overall health in the bargain, given the hills that characterize our particular stretch of McLennan County, Texas. He paraded through the neighborhood as if on a grand inspection tour of the troops and grounds. Some folks called him "The Flag" because of his extraordinarily long, pronounced, fluffy white tail which never, ever flagged. And, in his perfectly adorable way, he soon prompted neighborhood conversation where it might not have occurred, especially in these polarized times.

Without my fully realizing it, Jackson became part of my identity and I became part of his. He not only kept me to a daily routine, he enlivened it. After our morning walks, during which over nearly eleven and a half years he helped me better know my neighborhood, my neighbors and myself, he ate breakfast, then retired to an old La-Z-Boy chair in my home office. If not slumbering (often a fitful slumber, given his constantly looking around and checking on my whereabouts at any given moment), he perched himself on one armrest, intently eyeing the length of our street from the front window of the office while I labored on newspaper columns and editorials or edited columns by fellow opinion page contributors or conducted and transcribed lengthy phone interviews with everyone from conservative commentator George Will to historically savvy political activist Beto O’Rourke to one of the Trump-loyal attorneys who filed a lawsuit to shelve the 2020 election — recordings of which were sometimes punctuated by Jackson's controlled, masculine, sobering warning of what he took to be possible threats and unwarranted intrusions upon his domain. Ironically, Jackson was ever accommodating to visitors Ann and I welcomed into our home, sometimes giving the distinct impression he might follow them out the door to other, more enriching opportunities.

At first sign of an intruder from that window — mailman, garbageman, neighbor mowing his lawn, neighborhood walker — Jackson barked till they abandoned ground, then looked over at me, seeking acknowledgement of his victory. I naturally always gave him this acknowledgement, usually in the form of verbal encouragement and strokes, even as I sought to calm his alarm by telling him that he was a "silly dog" for barking at, say, a neighborhood squirrel or the postal carrier making his daily rounds. Yet Jackson was never yappy, never ill-tempered the way some of his poodle breed are – except that we discovered through DNA tests, pursued on a lark by my wife the way adoring pet owners will, that Jackson was only half poodle, half plenty else, including hound dog. He was, I suppose you could say, an all-American “E pluribus unum” dog – "Out of many, one."

And there were our contemplative evening walks – earlier in the short days of autumn and winter, later in torrid Texas summers when I waited after sundown for streets and curbs to cool sufficiently for Jackson – obviously closer to the ground – to safely patrol the neighborhood, though even then I tried to keep him on the grass, which was cooler. (Jackson with the greatest of agility preferred walking on the curbs – I called him a “circus dog.”) He seemed impervious to extremes of weather and we braved all sorts, including briefer daily walks during the Big Freeze of February 2021 when ice encased neighborhood streets and the power in homes across Texas failed, resulting in scores of deaths. I took a spill on one of these walks – nothing bruised but my ego – but Jackson demonstrated his usual remarkable agility – so much easier, my wife observed amusedly, when one travels about on four legs rather than two.

A peacefully astronomical or astrological or celestial or astral quality – I’m not quite sure how to put it – graced our seasonal evening strolls, the stars gradually emerging during longer walks after sundown. I especially remember our walks in 2020 when Mars was reportedly at its closest to Earth – a mere 38,568,816 miles away, its third nearest approach in some 60,000 years. It dominated all else like some radiant, orienting orange jewel in the relative consistency of the night sky. Just for the record, Jackson was also with my wife and me during the April 2024 total solar eclipse which brought thousands of eclipse-watchers to Waco and Central Texas; from our courtyard where we watched, Jackson demonstrated no particular fear or confusion or concern when the moon abruptly crossed before the sun and briefly ushered day into darkness. It was just one of many daily miracles Jackson beheld.

And not to read too much into it, but Jackson loved smelling flowers, even those in which I could detect no scent whatsoever. Whatever caught his attention, he appeared riveted.

Ann welcomes Jackson to his forever home, 2013.

Notwithstanding his tender regard for flowers, puppies and kittens, Jackson ordinarily proved a headstrong, vigorous dog with an utterly infectious yet willful personality. “He who must be obeyed,” I sometimes sarcastically remarked, borrowing from H. Rider Haggard’s famous novel. Given my inability to come up with a fitting name, Ann named him after Jackson Teller, a leading character from "Sons of Anarchy," a favorite TV series of hers about an outlaw motorcycle gang, as well as her best friend’s maiden name. Ann imagined she would simply call him "Jax" as the character in "Sons of Anarchy" is called, but she never did. In daily life I called him "Champ," she called him "Buddy," particularly when kidding Jackson about his following me everywhere after I came to spend most of my days at home during the pandemic in spring 2020 and slid right on into retirement later. "I used to have a little white dog who looked just like you," Ann cooed. But he was always, always Jackson – a name that not only stuck but invited speculation by many on our reason for choosing such the name. My aunt, who during these politically polarized times voiced absolute devotion to Donald Trump (despite her belief in a woman’s right to choose and climate change), expressed hope Ann and I had not named him after civil rights activist Jesse Jackson. I’m still not sure where that came from. I finally fell into the habit of telling people that we named the dog after our seventh president because it was simpler to explain and Andrew Jackson – hero of the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812 and enduring symbol of American democracy’s reach into the daily lives of the common man – was also on the $20 bill. That said, most fellow citizens I’ve encountered and casually tested on civics knowledge can’t cite who’s on the currency in our pockets and purses.

Jackson was the perfect one to prompt introduction and conversation with neighbors and strangers, whether in Central Texas, the pine-topped mountains of New Mexico where we summered (and where Jackson, during our out-and-about strolls, earned more spur-of-the-moment invitations into people’s cabins and homes than I certainly would’ve on my own) or the sprawling deserts of southern Arizona (but mornings only). Yet at home he reveled as he engaged in what pet therapists call “enrichment.” This involved, first and foremost, the absolute necessity of playing with his toys, something we continued throughout his life, right up till the day before he mysteriously sickened. His favorite passion at home: interacting with a set of progressively larger stuffed toy hedgehogs, so beloved by Jackson because, when thrown, they bounced up and about in the most unpredictable ways, challenging his agility and attack in not only “catching” them but wrestling them to the ground.  “Action Jackson” then insisted he be pursued through the house rather than simply giving up his catch, a baffling activity that kept me busier than I always liked. Ann meanwhile not only trained him in fundamental commands – “come,” “stay,” “no” – but little tricks such as “praying,” absurdly popular with visitors, religious or not, and his waiting, patient but alert, till a wall of paper cups had been meticulously erected, then knocking them down triumphantly upon command.

But all this was secondary to our walks and subsequent mornings in my office, especially upon retirement in November 2020, when he ate breakfast with me and provided company (often through healthy diversion from my work at the keyboard) as I labored on what I hoped were thoughtful essays and probing interviews as Tribune-Herald opinion editor emeritus. Unwilling to waste institutional memory built up over decades as a work-a-day journalist, I continued to regularly step into the political, societal and cultural fray, an arrangement welcomed by former colleagues grappling with the challenges of a dwindling newsroom in an age when so many Americans got what they satisfied themselves was news via talk radio, social media and Fox News. It became a retirement pursuit the way some people deliver Meals on Wheels to aging or incapacitated shut-ins. And Jackson my workmate. Through our walks, he kept me in touch with the here and now of the neighborhood, even as I thought through disturbing issues of the era on our twice-a-day walks. On some walks, only Jackson looked like he knew where we were going because my head was often in the clouds. He often led our strolls, and seldom the same route from day to day. And then, of course, there were those memorable encounters with the neighbors.

More than a quarter of my career as a Texas journalist was spent in not only sharing diligently researched opinions with others through the mainstay of the daily newspaper opinion page I oversaw but actively soliciting the opinions of others – and not just through their letters to the editor and submitted columns but by plunging headlong into the mass of humanity at parades, fairs and polling places, always seeking to better understand trends ensuing across our nation. In my retirement, Jackson helped ensure the civility of such solicitations amid conversations he definitely helped initiate and facilitate in the neighborhood, rife with support for Donald Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024. I remember, for instance, a spirited, pre-retirement evening exchange on economic policy on one of my walks with Jackson. James Tipton, retired professor of finance who taught for three decades in Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business, voiced strong views on finance in support of President Trump during his first term – a conversation in front of James’ home that ensued under the midsummer stars and softened when Tipton, pausing in our exchange, insisted on getting Jackson a bowl of cool water, given Jackson and I were a mile from home and the air was still warm. James’ compassion for my little dog touched me, given his hard-edged political views and his reputation as a straightshooter seldom without a vigorous, well-argued opinion; a week or so after this exchange, the 71-year-old Army veteran, economics professor, active Boy Scout troop leader and master-level chess player was dead, a loss to the community. Jackson and I never again passed the Tipton home without my thinking of James’ kindness that summer evening of 2019, notwithstanding political views that I saw as destructive. His widow Barbara continued such kindnesses whenever Jackson and I strolled by. Yet I now also reflect on Jackson’s own example, so patient and so tolerant to regularly suffer such pauses on our walks to debate issues of the day, a citizen-to-citizen digression that everyone from American author Washington Irving to French traveler Alexis de Tocqueville recognized and celebrated as distinctly American in the republic’s rambunctious early days. Sometimes, possibly realizing the futility of a given exchange, Jackson barked at me to continue our travels.

Jackson & supporting cast

Certainly dogs have their roles to play in all this. Another neighbor, four houses from mine, is an unrepentant Trump supporter who lowered his U.S. flag in 2020 and raised a Trump campaign flag in its place, then did the same during the 2024 election. He complemented this show of patriotism (as he no doubt viewed it) by hanging, in one of many trees gracing his beautifully maintained yard, a Trump 2024 birdhouse. Conversations included one (also witnessed by Jackson) in which my neighbor implied but never quite came out and said that the alarm over COVID-19 was exaggerated to the point he and his wife continued to participate in monthly dinner club gatherings of a dozen or so. Yet I reflected not so much on his political preferences or even the loss of his wife – who when dating him 46 years earlier found him “full of himself” – but, rather, on how this quiet, agreeable widower for several years lovingly indulged his own little dog when the pooch became too old and too fat for daily walks. Wayne lifted his pudgy pooch into the car twice a day, lowered the front window and drove about the neighborhood, simulating as close as possible the daily walks they once enjoyed. Our paths would cross. His pooch would bark at Jackson from the car window (to which Jackson paid little notice); Wayne and I would wave to each other. Once, as I was picking up after Jackson at the edge of my neighbor’s yard, Wayne noticed and told me I needn’t do so when it came to his yard, that anything Jackson left behind was fine by him. I thanked him, of course, but told him that picking up after my dog struck me as a neighborly thing to do. (Many neighbors regularly posted on a neighborhood app their outrage at pet owners neglectful of such obligations.) Sadly, our contact lessened after the death of my neighbor’s dog.

For the record, my most enduring memory of COVID-19 – which Ann and I did take seriously as fellow Central Texans withered and died after contracting the highly contagious virus – involved our haphazard, hours-long sessions every six weeks of trying to trim and groom Jackson with a set of professional sheers and combs – all wielded, I fear, unprofessionally, amounting to an exhausting foray for us, even though Jackson endured all this humiliation stoically. Meanwhile, Jackson and I continued neighborly exchanges during the pandemic, its deadly threat significantly lessened in open-air encounters.

In short, even after my days as a newspaperman divining opinions of fellow citizens at parades, fairs and polling places formally ended in November 2020 – a thoughtfully timed retirement in what I mistakenly assumed would prove an end to the historically significant Age of Trump – walks with Jackson through our mostly white, mostly Republican Waco suburb ensured that I continued to confront and ponder viewpoints of neighbors who might or might not see matters as I did. Jackson, in all his adorableness, helped not only bring about such encounters but in his way encouraged neighborliness to prevail in all such exchanges. Nor were all encounters with those who counted themselves in the Make America Great Again movement. For instance, there was retired physician and political activist Phil Reeder, an engagingly kinetic sort whom I got to know through my daily walks with Jackson past his home, then came to appreciate and know better through absorbing evenings with like-minded individuals from different perspectives and different walks of life – attorneys, physicians, accountants, scholars, even a symphony orchestra conductor. All this ensued on Phil’s back patio, often over a glass of whiskey, often overlooking the sun setting on the South Bosque flowing into Lake Waco. These informal gatherings over time evolved into monthly meetings of the “Twelve Angry Men” (well, at least, as I came to call it, at my wife's droll suggestion), huddling in the home of one of our dozen to vigorously debate politics, history, philosophy and the spiraling, ever-shifting state of the public mind in the dizzying, confounding and alarming Age of Trump, often enlivened by my insights and testimonials gained in the company of Jackson. We put our minds to the same all-American dilemmas de Tocqueville did in touring America in the tumultuous Age of Jackson, trying to ascertain the American psyche that the French political thinker in his era so admired, even with his deep reservations regarding our stubborn societal racism and our astounding failure to elect leaders of the caliber of the Founding Fathers. In those failings, one wondered whether we had fundamentally changed so much since the early 1830s.

Insights into America gained in my neighborhood travels with Jackson are illuminating, thought-provoking: the Baylor University sociology professor and data-cruncher who reminded me that many local suburbs such as the one in which we live and the one 20 miles off in which George W. Bush settled shortly before his presidential election originally developed because of white flight in Central Texas amidst resistance to court-ordered school segregation; the African-American retiree who had earlier worked at the Pentagon and eventually moved from our Woodway neighborhood to a city in the Deep South to be among more of her race, notwithstanding the fact she proved popular among Woodway neighbors because of her radiant, upbeat personality and ingratiating humor; the couple who planned upon retirement resettling in Italy, formerly ruled by everyone from Augustus and Caligula to Mussolini and Silvio Berlusconi, because the MAGA mission in 21st America clearly required the snuffing out of so many individual rights; the white widow of a missionary who informed me presidential candidate Kamala Harris was a socialist – a conclusion reached because Harris’ father was a socialist, even though he only taught socialism at Stanford and never embraced it as a personal ideology; the Baylor instructor who, amidst President Trump’s talk of annexing Canada as our nation’s 51st state, ran up a Canadian flag in protest outside his home; the insurance attorney, Army veteran and walking buddy who thrice voted for Trump and seldom raised the subject of politics but for one memorable occasion when he tersely informed a mutual friend of ours in the street that, whatever else, “when the Supreme Court tells you to do something, Mr. President, you do it” – his reaction to the Trump administration’s defiance of federal courts, including a direct order from the nation’s highest court; the amiable but gullible Trumper who hired some vagabonds knocking at his front door to trim his picturesque canopy of live and red oaks – only to discover after they left (and with more than a thousand dollars of his money) that they had cut many of the live limbs and branches and left all the dead ones; the Vietnam veteran and neighbor who, after voicing outrage over the Trump administration’s imminent firing of tens of thousands of Department of Veterans Affairs employees, many of them veterans, insisted he was blameless in that he not only hadn’t voted for Trump but hadn’t voted at all; and, finally, a normally jubilant, big-hearted neighborhood woman who told Jackson and me of ordering two expensive straw purses on the day Trump sent the stock market reeling with announcement of “Liberation Day” tariffs. When a clerk inquired why she was cancelling the order just two days later, she replied, “My husband and I lost $180,000 in the stock market because of Trump,” prompting the sales clerk to ask, cluelessly, like so many Americans in our times: “Why? What did Trump do?”

Jackson visits friends Gwen and Gary Kane in Tuscon, 2014

Rather than retiring with Ann at day's end, Jackson always stayed with me well into the wee hours of the morning. He was the last set of eyes I saw at night, as he curled up in a ball of warmth, confidence and contentment between Ann and me in bed, sometimes at 2 or 3; he was the first set of eyes I saw come morning, as I dressed to start the coffeemaker and straighten up the house. When he should have been sleeping, his eyes rigorously followed me as I tiptoed to leave the bedroom, even as he remained on the bed next to Ann. Soon from the living room, I would hear his little toenails clicking eagerly on the wooden floor of the bedroom, his quiet signal for me to let him out of the bedroom. Then it was a reassuring massage of his shoulders, neck, chest and back as well as a stroke of his famous tail; some play with his toys; and our first walk of the new day, followed by breakfast and guard duties just a few feet from me in the office where I continued to write about what so often seemed the decline and fall of a once-great nation – a period when so many Americans in a land of plenty amid hard-won blessings of liberty and economic opportunity were consumed with grievance, resentment and hatred for one another, some to the point of actually wishing for apocalyptic scenarios if only to vanquish their enemies, real and imagined. Jackson was good tonic amidst all this, particularly in bringing out the best in my neighbors and, I hope, in me. His influence on me and others constitutes, arguably, yet another Age of Jackson, however provincial.

Jackson understood the importance of variety in life. Often in the interim of my daily pursuits, he courted Ann. Sitting in a comfortable recliner opposite Ann in her "hideaway room," briefly distracting her from those aches and pains that come to us all should we live long enough, he nonetheless kept his eyes peeled beyond the doorway for new adventures elsewhere in the house – that is, me. Even so, he enjoyed sitting at Ann's feet or on the love seat in our sunroom while Ann practiced songs on one of three ukuleles for some upcoming Waco Ukulele Orchestra concert to which she had committed. Occasionally, Jackson added vocal accompaniment to Ann’s musicmaking – a most wonderful hound-like howl, perhaps a genetic holdover from his mixed ancestry. On other occasions he rolled about joyfully on his back, kicking his feet into the air, prompting Ann to pause our conversation – “Look, this is one of those moments” – and then motioning excitedly to this impulsive and fleeting burst of canine joie de vivre.

Late into the evening, he retired to the living room sofa; at times he draped his head over the armrest to eagerly await my return from the kitchen with, say, a glass of wine or cup of coffee to edit future newspaper columns in my recliner or read a book of history and political theory or philosophy or, finally, watch TV during which I joined him on the sofa, mindful that he really, really disliked feet, sometimes to the point that he growled lowly. Well, of course.

I didn't fully realize till Jackson was gone that the little guy was such an integral part of my daily life that I now find myself totally disoriented, let alone dispirited, by his abrupt departure. It is, I suppose, another lesson on the fragility of life of which the philosophers ponder and speak. My good friend Phil Reeder remarked knowingly upon learning of Jackson's sudden health troubles: "Bill, you have friends and you have friends – and then you have Jackson." Indeed. There is something about a faithful canine companion that allows one to confide the deepest of confidences, including our gnawing fears and wildest dreams. Longtime Texas congressman and Obama vice presidential prospect Chet Edwards – whose decency, compassion and keen insights into politics, history and the human condition marked our relationship as it evolved into friendship in our post-retirement years – marveled upon news of Jackson's death at the relationship between people and dogs – “there is just something magical about it that makes life worth living." He further noted: "I have always tried to remember that death can cause pain but it cannot stop love."

On April 18, when at age 13, “Action Jackson” went in for his yearly array of geriatric tests, he as usual excelled in everything — bloodwork, chemistry, weight, attitude, all of it. He displayed terrific health, probably owing to daily walks, a quality diet, twice-a-year veterinary exams and lots and lots of interaction and laughter and adventure and inclusion. For him, as for us, life was worth living, even amid the delusion and vindictiveness that now seemed to plague the land. Less than three weeks after demonstrating perfect health, Jackson was dead of a terrible autoimmune malady that five different veterinarians over several long days battled in concert without enduring success. No one knows what triggered the affliction; only wild guesses were offered, and these without any foundation — a mystery typical of this frustrating and often fatal condition in both people and their best friends. I learned a new word after long conversations with each of these veterinarians and during daily hospital visits with an increasingly listless, despondent Jackson – “idiopathic,” which my veterinarian explained after a multitude of tests and treatments is “a fancy word for ‘we just don’t know.’” Uncharacteristically, Jackson failed to rally, yet never once whimpered in my presence as his body succumbed to this infuriatingly unreasonable disease, its cause possibly buried in genetics rather than some outside cause. At the very end, as death loomed, Ann stroked Jackson’s neck and back, encouraging further slumber amid the discontent he clearly experienced. I lay next to him, face to face, our eyes meeting this last extended time, my breath on him and his on me, as he passed in and out of natural sleep in exhaustion before the merciful and quiet hastening of the very end. He passed with not even the slightest shudder or tremor. I continued to weep, caress and embrace him, grateful for the peace in his departure as I shook with grief and rage over the impending emptiness of my life without this innocent little dog.

Grief experienced strongly enough, especially given the mystery of sickness and death to a mind governed by reason, can summon up ghostly apparitions of a sort. I sheepishly raised this with Air Force veteran and motorcycle mechanic Gary Kane – to me, the definition of self-confident, independent-minded yet reflective manhood in a society where so many men are emotionally wounded or crippled to the point of living shallow stereotypes. I admitted that, crazy though it was, I kept hearing Jackson's little toenails tapping on the wooden floor and, on other occasions, the light tinkling of Jackson’s collar in distant corners of the house. Gary acknowledged the same after he lost his beloved border collie Jake, the victim of terrible seizures during his last years. "I’m positive you all did everything in your power to keep Jackson happy and healthy," he counseled. "Sometimes there is no rhyme or reason why things happen. Seems like the need to know the 'why' is overwhelming. There are still things that will trigger me to think Jake is still here. It took me several years not to jump out of bed if I heard anything in the night that sounded like Jake was having a seizure."

In the wake of Jackson's death, I find myself walking later in the morning and evening, thus avoiding chance encounters with well-meaning neighbors who know me only in Jackson's company. I am yet unwilling to go through the difficulty of explaining what on earth happened to Jackson and why I now walk alone. I feel shame, too, in not knowing what I might have done or not done that possibly caused Jackson's sickness (notwithstanding all the tests done and my introduction to the word "idiopathy"), shame that nothing I and the veterinarians could do, even when expense was no concern, could save him. I worry, too, that perhaps I let medical efforts to save him go on beyond all reason, prolonging his trials.  

My friend, retired corporate executive Mike Raymond, sent me a brief Jan. 3, 2024, essay from the Wall Street Journal by attorney Mike Kerrigan on the grief many have for beloved dogs upon their passing. An excerpt is instructive. It reflects on a friend's grief for a dog named Bear: "I like to think that this life isn't all there was for Bear. Years ago, Archbishop Fulton Sheen first perked up my ears, so to speak, on the spirituality of dogs. In his autobiography, ‘Treasure in Clay,’ Sheen wrote that during his holy hour of prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, at times he felt 'like a dog at the master's door, ready in case he called me.’” Kerrigan’s essay continued:

British writer C.S. Lewis went a step further in “The Problem of Pain,” in which he made a plausible case for hounds in heaven. Lewis thought sufficient selfhood might exist in dogs and other domesticated animals that their immortality is subsumed within their master's heavenly destiny. For my money, though, G.K. Chesterton made the best case for dogs in heaven. In “Orthodoxy," Chesterton proposed that perhaps the one thing too great for God to have shown when he walked the earth was his mirth. What is more mirthful than the thought of a surprise party on heavenly move-in day where gathered guests include good ol' Fido? And who could keep such a joyful secret but someone with infinite patience?

Jackson on the homefront, 2017

Granted, some tough-talking, testosterone-driven cowboy stoic who rides herd over animals or some judgmental Christian nationalist who strictly limits humanity to humans (and then only certain humans) might see my grief over a dearly departed canine as a huge failure of manhood, a “woke” flaw in my psychological makeup. Yet Jackson’s vitality, optimism and jubilance around the home, in the neighborhood and on vacations; his insistence on active, fulfilling interaction, whether with toys or in our caresses or on walks or in my conversations with him; his resilience in the face of my occasional preoccupations and indifferences; his fidelity or at least preference for the company of my wife and me, to the degree he often dogged my heels – a consequence, I imagined, of his apparently being abandoned early in life; his energy and confidence in himself regarding all things and in all settings, so contagious and so invigorating during anxious daily life as shut-ins during the pandemic of 2020-21 and my own transformation from a busy lifestyle as a deadline-oriented newspaperman to retirement of the sort Cicero encouraged – one of deep reflection, simple joys and the gradual sorting out of what really mattered in life; the void Jackson filled for cherished family members who had moved on in life and death – all these stamp his passing as devastating, a testimonial of a brief life vibrantly lived and shared, a loss to be mourned, particularly given the suddenness and finality of death here on Earth amid endless intrigue and speculation about life and death for both man and dog.

My compliments go to all involved in Jackson's May 6, 2025, leave-taking, including Dr. Corey Zamzow and Dr. Jered Johnston of the South Bosque Veterinary Clinic, for an extraordinarily peaceful departure after diligent efforts to save him, as well as others who worked around the clock at Waco Animal Emergency Clinic, including Dr. Jade Haberman, Dr. Clay Wilson and Dr. Pat Griffin. Ann and I are now left with overwhelming grief, including wondering whether we savored Jackson as much as we possibly could. My friend – minister and world religions scholar Blake Burleson of Baylor University, with whom I serve on the local newspaper’s board of contributors – says the process of such grief is vital, relevant, even resurrectionary. "Grieving is a good thing; you loved Jackson," he advised me afterward. "Death is always a blow, a physical one at that. It hits us. Live into that now. It is remarkable how close these sentient beings are to us — truly man’s best friend." Another friend, Army veteran, music teacher and political activist Mark Hays, who got to know Jackson at our home during monthly gatherings of “Twelve Angry Men” to discuss politics and philosophy and current events, even held out hope of a reunion, just as Chesterton did. “I often think how wrong it seems that our animal friends have such short lives,” Mark counseled. “I think that they are better than we who do so much evil and destroy so much on such a huge scale. I don't know, but I do believe that they have souls and that we may see them again on the other side. You gave Jackson a wonderful life full of love, companionship and fun. He will be waiting to greet you.”

At the risk of seeming utterly delusionary to cynics and naysayers, I hope for many, many more of those shared walks amid the stars, which somehow even on terra firma I believed would never really end. Just think of the others Jackson and I might soon encounter.

Jackson awaits further engagement, 2020

Described by one of his editors as “an equal-opportunity skeptic” and one of his readers as a "modern-day Don Quixote" (for better or worse), Bill Whitaker in November 2020 retired from Texas journalism after a career of nearly 45 years as a reporter, editor and columnist. He served as Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor during his final dozen years in the profession.