Bush riding lonesome into the sunset

 

On Oct. 10, after weeks of former President Trump riling up crowds and dominating news cycles with lies about legal Haitian-born immigrants eating neighbors’ pets in Ohio; lies about Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris being a Marxist, apparently because her dad taught Marxism at Stanford; and yet more lies about the 2020 election being rigged against him despite scores of court decisions, audits and recounts to the contrary, another former president finally seized the spotlight to set matters straight.

Maligned during his own presidency as a foreign-born infidel by Trump, then a loud-mouthed reality-TV star and flamboyant business tycoon, Barack Obama highlighted the latest bizarro act of the traveling Trump circus in the 2024 presidential campaign: how Trump, in the Hurricane Helene aftermath, “just started making up stories about the Biden administration withholding aid from Republican areas and siphoning off aid to give to undocumented immigrants, just made the stuff up,” to score political points.

“And this has consequences,” Obama argued, “because people are afraid and they’ve lost everything and now they’re trying to figure out, ‘How do I apply for help?’ and some of them may be discouraged from getting the help they need – (and) the idea of intentionally trying to deceive people in their most desperate and vulnerable moments. And my question is: When did that become OK?” He then asked of any Republicans within earshot: “When did that become OK? Why would we go along with that?”

Like him or not, America’s only black president, 63, remains by far our nation’s most eloquent present-day champion of American virtues and values. His remarks in Pittsburgh on behalf of the Harris-Walz campaign showed he had lost none of his keen insights about America at its finest, even as he sought to push back against what some of us believe to be America at its worst: the Make America Great Again juggernaut and its employment of conspiracy theories, racism and hatred to divide and incite.

Yet Obama’s address not only begs overdue reflection by introspective and informed Americans at this critical juncture in our history but invites a legitimate question, especially for those of us who have long lived in the stretch of Central Texas once known as “Bush Country”: Where is former President George W. Bush, 78, amidst what by all accounts is the most pivotal presidential election of our times? Will he too lend his unique influence, one way or the other, as a past president to guide fellow citizens?

Or would his post-presidential influence even matter to anyone?

For newcomers, it’s impossible to convey the swelled pride Wacoans once had in President Bush, whose 1,600-acre ranch near Crawford transformed that town into a tourist mecca, complete with souvenir shops. The ranch was known as the Western White House where the president hosted international dignitaries, then met with local and national press. Nearby Waco welcomed entourages from all over. Baylor University launched an ambitious campaign to land the Bush presidential library.

Upon settling in Waco in summer 2002, I found many residents hoped the presidential aura would end the city’s close identification with Branch Davidian cultists whose crimes sparked a deadly shootout and standoff with federal agents in 1993 some 10 miles east of Waco. All ended horribly in a tank and tear-gas assault that saw the cult’s apocalyptic, Bible-quoting prophet and his gun-toting flock killed in an inferno, fueling an anti-government movement nationwide arguably culminating in the Age of Trump.

I also concluded over time that the president’s officials understood the public relations perils of any close association with Waco, which back then conjured crazy religious fundamentalists, self-styled messiahs and supposed federal overreach. In press releases and news events, they identified the Western White House with Crawford, a mostly white town that better fit the ruggedly individualistic, Reaganesque, riding-the-range, sunny, outdoor persona that Bush clearly preferred.

In those days, Wacoans – particularly Republicans – took a dim view of any criticism of Bush. The only time my ordinarily gracious neighbor, former Waco mayor and decorated war veteran J.R. Closs, ever cross-examined me about my association with the Waco Tribune-Herald was after the editorial board endorsed Bush’s challenger, John Kerry, in the 2004 presidential election. I tactfully explained that I headed up the news department as city editor and had nothing to do with political endorsements.

Since then, the pride has flown. Paralleling the Republican Party, what was once Bush Country is now unrepentant Trump country. On the advice of Texas Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Trump selected Waco to formally launch his 2024 reelection campaign. And during the March 25, 2023, rally at Waco Regional Airport, Trump publicly debuted a big-screen video of his reciting the Pledge of Allegiance while the disembodied voices of January 6 insurrection detainees eerily sang the national anthem.

Since then, the campaign has employed darker and darker imagery.

When asked by Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo on Oct. 13 about thousands of Chinese nationals living in the United States, criminal elements among immigrants in America and the prospect of violence on Election Day 2024, Trump, 78, insisted the “bigger problem is the enemy from within.” He made clear he wasn’t referring to illegal immigrants but “sick people, radical left lunatics.” However, he added reassuringly, “it should be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard or, if really necessary, by the military."

"We have the greatest military in the world, but you have to know how to use ’em,” Trump said at an Oct. 11 rally in Colorado. “You have to know how to use ’em. But I protect you against outside enemies but, you know, I always say, we have the outside enemies – you can say China, you can say Russia, you can say Kim Jong Un – but if you have a smart president, no problem. It's the enemy from within, all the scum that we have to deal with that hate our country. That's a bigger enemy than China and Russia."

Such statements, coming from an unprincipled figure who tried to invalidate 2020 presidential election returns through a phony electors scheme, who did nothing to stop Trump rioters after they attacked the U.S. Capitol and brutalized police, who has vowed to be a dictator on Day One of his next presidency, who has argued for terminating the U.S. Constitution, all culminating with the notion of using military force to quell or corral fellow citizens with whom he differs, is unprecedented in U.S. history.

In a CNN interview, retired Army Maj. Gen. Randy Manner said many Americans don’t comprehend the low threshold for an unhinged president intent on dispatching armed forces against fellow citizens he deems his enemies: “There are so many things that could be done because these are areas where sane men don’t go. It’s basically the guardrails of our democracy, the rule of law, that prevents civilian leaders from going where they should not go. But President Trump is not like any sane leader.”   

Retired four-star Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, recently signaled concern to the New York Times: “Well, I'm looking at the definition of fascism. It’s a far-right, authoritarian, ultra-nationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy. So certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America.”

And who are Trump’s “scum”? In a Fox News town hall, Trump cited Democratic lawmaker Adam Schiff, who led investigations into Trump’s politically motivated dealings with Ukraine, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who singled out Trump as a “threat to American democracy,” as examples “so sick and they’re so evil.” During this leadup to the election he also cited Jamaican-born District Judge Tanya Chutkan, presiding over his long-delayed federal election interference trial, as “the most evil person.”

Such tirades – including Trump’s labeling of his political opponents as “Marxists and communists and fascists” – reflect a disturbing theme Republicans have pressed for a while now. I recall the Oct. 25, 2020, Faith & Freedom Coalition rally at Waco's Church of the Open Door where Republican state Sen. Brian Birdwell, a 9/11 survivor whose district includes Waco, suggested those allied against President Trump did not love their country. I was shocked a military veteran could say such a thing of fellow citizens.

Meanwhile, Trump continues to reject any suggestion that he bore at least some blame for the violence committed in his name and literally under his banner on the Sixth of January. In an Oct. 20 interview on Fox News with media expert Howard Kurtz, the former president not only stubbornly justified those who marched on the U.S. Capitol as legitimate protesters – “they came because they thought it was a rigged election” – but said of the mob, “there was a beauty to it and a love to it that I’ve never seen before.”

As Obama somberly lectured young black Harris-Walz supporters in Pittsburgh of an inertia he sensed among some about a woman president, one could hardly imagine in turn justifying someone of Trump’s racial temperament and character being in charge of anything. “I didn’t mean to get so serious, but when I hear about this stuff, I start feeling like we don’t have enough of a sense of what’s at stake here,” he said at one point. “These are not ordinary times and these are not ordinary elections.”

Obama has been criticized as patronizing in his remarks to young black Harris supporters, but such criticism invites scrutiny of what we then behold in Trump’s rhetoric, including the spectacle of using military forces to suppress Americans whom the president deems enemies of the state, talk that evokes the deadly totalitarianism of Hitler and Stalin. Given that half the United States seems to embrace such madness or overlooks it, sage counsel – however patronizing – may be not only relevant but overdue.

And where is Bush?

Fort Worth Star-Telegram columnist Cynthia Allen in an Oct. 2 piece argues we should all just let Bush be. “There's something undeniably refreshing about a politician who recognizes that his or her role as an influencer should have a shelf life. And after carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders for so many years while receiving mostly criticism for it in the media, it doesn't seem unfair or unpatriotic for Bush to wish to live out his post-presidential days in apolitical peace.”

Maybe, though blaming media for what historians and even Trump sycophants now conclude of the Bush presidency is a little rich and hints at Allen’s political leanings. To build on what she argues, Bush might also be exactly the wrong one to join Americans of principle ranging from former Congresswoman Liz Cheney to Barack Obama in their mission to defeat Trump. While the Bush presidency was not without its triumphs, it displayed a jarring lack of insight, competence and focus in times of immense crisis.  

In pursuing the 2003 invasion of Iraq as an elective war based on questionable intelligence, the Bush administration further inflamed the volatile Mideast by failing to grasp the intense 1,400-year-old religious polarization of Sunni and Shia branches of Islam. His administration’s employment of political cronyism to select leadership for the Federal Emergency Management Agency ultimately exacerbated bungled relief and recovery efforts along the devastated Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Nor did the Bush presidency end well after wildly unregulated markets; irresponsible loans by banks to corporations and consumers brimming with toxic risks; an overheated housing market; and politicians’ failure to discern complicated economic dynamics contributed to the disastrous Great Recession of 2008. Even the Trib recognized trouble early on, blaming Bush in 2004 for “unsound fiscal choices at home, particularly leaning on unnecessary tax cuts in wartime that have driven the nation deeply into debt.”

And there’s the issue of whether Bush misread or mishandled Russian President Putin, including during the latter’s celebrated visit to the town of Crawford and nearby Bush ranch in 2001, two months after the 9/11 attacks that subsequently colored so much of the Bush presidency, including the torture of Muslim prisoners at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison. Bush famously declared he looked into Putin’s eyes, finding him “very straightforward and trustworthy.” Such words now strike many as hopelessly naïve.

Bush’s eventful presidency also revealed telling strains in the Republican Party between those who recognized disagreement and debate are part of a clangorous democracy and those contemptuous of civility and mutual respect. For some of us, this became evident during anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan's month-long peace vigil near Bush's ranch in summer 2005, inspired by the 2004 death of Sheehan’s son, Army Specialist Casey Sheehan, killed in battle with Shiite militia near Baghdad.

As supporters and opponents of the Iraq war “rallied, marched and simmered in the 101-degree heat” (to quote the Trib), a Richardson, Texas, man carried a sign into an Aug. 27 pro-Bush rally that read: "How to wreck your family in 30 days by bitch-in-the-ditch Cindy Sheehan" – an unnecessarily cruel allusion to Sheehan’s summer divorce from her husband of 28 years. When an event organizer protested the sign for its profanity and malice, a fight erupted between the two Republicans. Police were called.

In her Star-Telegram column, Allen argues “it is rather fun to imagine Bush in his library offices housed on the Southern Methodist University campus, characteristically chuckling to himself as he reads the daily paper, delighted to not be one of its regular subjects.” Bush has “said nary a word about the election, instead keeping his head down and his focus on the good work of his Dallas-based foundation and library.”

Rather fun? Good work? A key aim of presidential libraries is spinning presidential legacies into a more pleasing light to benefit their honorees. Thus his library busies itself in such exhibits as one on “Dining and Diplomacy” that offers a look at what Bush served to visiting dignitaries, including Putin at the Bush ranch on Nov. 14, 2001: guacamole salad, mesquite-smoked peppered beef tenderloin, southern-fried catfish, fire-roasted potatoes with poblano peppers and grilled sourdough bread with onion butter.

For the visiting king and queen of Spain, we are informed that the Bush Western White House served free-range turkey, Prairie Chapel bass, mashed sweet potatoes with maple syrup and chipotles, pan-roasted root vegetables, cornbread stuffing and Port & Hall Hyde chardonnay. And we learn that British Prime Minister Tony Blair, during his visit to the ranch with wife Cherie, at one point “borrowed a guitar and strummed and sang along with the San Antonio band Daddy Rabbit.”

True, Bush’s center in 2023 did participate in a mushy joint statement by 13 presidential libraries: “Each of us has a role to play and responsibilities to uphold. Our elected officials must lead by example and govern effectively in ways that deliver for the American people. This, in turn, will help to restore trust in public service. The rest of us must engage in civil dialogue; respect democratic institutions and rights; uphold safe, secure and accessible elections; and contribute to local, state or national improvement.”

And the Bush Institute certainly tackles timely policy questions in its publication, The Catalyst. Yet in a Q&A in the winter 2024 issue, when asked about the raging divide in America, including “one party in the thrall of a self-declared dictator,” Bush proved evasive, even naïve in his attempts at bothsidism: “It’s not an attempt to seriously solve problems. To me, it seems like our politics have become about self-preservation – anticipating some popular movement and either leading it or trying to head it off.”

The Bush Institute also expresses concern over rapidly multiplying “news deserts” in populated cities in which daily newspapers have dried up, yet Bush is mum about Trump’s attacks on legitimate news media. “They’re the enemy of the people, they are,” Trump said on Oct. 24 to cheers in Tempe, Arizona. “They’re the enemy of the people – I’ve been asked not to say that, I don’t want to say it – they’re the enemy of the people, and someday they’re not going to be the enemy of the people, I hope.”   

Bush’s approach is certainly different from that of Obama, who in Pittsburgh suggested that many of us as rational citizens might normally distance ourselves from a co-worker or client who told malicious lies: “And yet when Donald Trump lies or cheats or shows utter disregard for our Constitution, when he calls POWs ‘losers’ or fellow citizens ‘vermin,’ people make excuses for it. They think it’s OK. They think, ‘Well, at least he’s owning the libs, he’s really sticking it to ’em. It’s OK as long as our side wins.’”

Perhaps Allen and others who revel in Bush’s staying above the national furor are right. After all, many Bush associates have already made sufficiently clear their sentiments on Trump, including former Vice President Cheney: “In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again."

Scores of former national security and foreign policy officials who served in the administrations of Republican presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Donald Trump or as Republican members of Congress have made clear they “expect to disagree with Kamala Harris on many domestic and foreign policy issues, but we believe that she possesses the essential qualities to serve as president and Donald Trump does not.” They continue:

“Donald Trump's susceptibility to flattery and manipulation by Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, unusual affinity for other authoritarian leaders, contempt for the norms of decent, ethical and lawful behavior and chaotic national security decision-making are dangerous qualities – as many honorable Republican colleagues and military officers who served in senior national security positions in his administration have frequently testified. He is unfit to serve again as president or indeed in any office of public trust.”

And during a February 2024 forum at the Rancho Mirage Writers Festival in California, Bush political consultant Karl Rove acknowledged his distaste in a Democratic president. “But we’re facing as a country a decision – and everybody gets to make it – as to what kind of leadership we’re going to have, and to me it is a mistake on the part of the Trump campaign to allow the president’s impulses to identify himself with the people who assaulted the Capitol rather than people who stand for law and order.”  

“I worked in that building as a young man,” Rove said. “To me, the Congress of the United States is one of the great examples of the strength of our democracy and a jewel of the Constitution. And what these people did when they violently attacked the Capitol in order to stop a constitutionally mandated meeting of the Congress to accept the results of the Electoral College is a stain on our history. And every one of those sons of bitches who did that, we ought to find ’em, try ’em and send ’em to jail.”

Such fiery words sit awkwardly with images of Bush enjoying an SMU volleyball match two weeks before the 2024 election, conjuring Samuel Adams’ observations as the revolution of 1776 ensued: “If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”

Delivered in a rousing speech in Philadelphia, Adams’ words might also be deemed “patronizing.” How dare he? Yet insights from those who have held or hold positions of responsible leadership can serve as useful guideposts in times of crisis and confusion. An early October Pew Research survey of 5,110 adults shows 72 percent of voters say if Harris loses, she will bow to law and tradition and acknowledge Trump’s electoral victory. Just 24 percent expect Trump to concede if he loses; 74 percent say he will not.

For the record, former President Bush is certainly capable of championing American values. Of all the 9/11 addresses held across the nation on the 20th anniversary of the Islamist terrorist attack in 2021, of all the remarks appealing to our patriotism and better angels and demanding deeper reflection about the state of our union, Bush’s ranked at the very top – appropriately, considering he was president at the time of the attacks and initiated two wars in its wake.

Bush fittingly spoke at the national monument erected in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where Flight 93 crashed after its passengers, mostly strangers to one another, voted on a plan, then forcefully prevented hijackers from crashing the airliner into its reported target – the Capitol. Nimbly addressing the “anger, fear and resentment” of today’s politics, Bush stressed “growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders but from violence that gathers within.

“There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home,” Bush said, referring to Mideast terrorists who plowed airliners into symbols of American power and commerce and Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol and sought to overthrow American democracy. “But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them.”

And that means ordinary citizens. During that same 9/11 observance near Shanksville, Gordon Felt, a special education teacher and the brother of Flight 93 victim Edward Felt, suggested the question was not so much how reverently we honor the fallen of 9/11, the brave passengers of Flight 93 and those who lingered in the twin towers at their peril to help strangers and co-workers, “but rather the question to be considered is: Are we worthy of their sacrifice? Are we worthy?

"Do we as individuals, communities and as a country conduct ourselves in a manner that would make those that sacrificed so much and fought so hard on September 11th proud of who we have become?” Felt asked. “Do we share the same willingness to sacrifice for others in little ways as well as large, to act when necessary for no other reason than to accomplish a noble goal, egoless and without other motivation than to do what is right?”

Those of us who fondly recall Bush’s “compassionate conservativism,” who recall his noble efforts to condemn threats leveled at Americans who are Muslim after the 9/11 attacks, who recall his efforts at comprehensive but humane immigration reform (with Sens. John McCain and Ted Kennedy as allies) now wonder if Bush’s speaking out to safeguard democracy and head off the carnage and chaos of another Trump reign might prove a redeeming final act or a massive waste of everybody’s time.

For better or worse, at this late date the prospect is likely not even on the menu.

Bill Whitaker spent nearly 45 years as a reporter, editor and columnist in Texas journalism, including a dozen years as Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor. He retired in 2020.

LOCK UP YOUR DOGS, CATS!

Like it or not, the mainstream punditry of our times often sorts out for the historians of tomorrow what resonates politically and societally today. And among the many armchair ponderings about the pivotal Sept. 10 Trump-Harris presidential debate, I was most struck by congressional reporter Jamie Dupree’s take: “Only two things will be talked about in detail on AM drive radio or TV about this debate: 1) Trump: Immigrants are eating cats and dogs. 2) Taylor Swift endorses Kamala Harris.”

In a way, this confirms what a wise friend advised a day before the debate. I had acknowledged little interest in the much-touted matchup because serious policy questions would likely go unanswered and exaggerated allegations and outright falsehoods would go uncorrected by debate moderators. Today’s presidential debates, my friend countered, may no longer mirror the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 but they do demonstrate a candidate’s ability to think fast on his or her feet. And there’s merit in this.

To extend this thought, presidential debates are now like gladiatorial matches with candidates dueling in words, claims, ideas, explanations and, yes, zingers that capture the imagination or tickle the funny bone. Take, for example, President Reagan’s witty comeback to challenger Walter Mondale when the issue of Reagan’s age (73) surfaced at the Oct. 21, 1984, debate: "I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience."

I’m stunned at the multitude of Trump disciples who claim their idol was mistreated because ABC News debate moderators dared to correct (and in real time!) Trump whenever he lied. His followers actually expect journalists to stay mum as the falsehoods and exaggerations pile up, misleading more citizenry than is already the case. No doubt, this expectation distinguishes and condemns our post-truth age. These same conspiracy addicts and willing dupes probably curse referees and umpires at ballgames.

The real problem: Their idol struck out at bat on the truth far more than his Democratic opponent did.

Many folks online, I notice, castigated ABC News’ David Muir for correcting Trump when the Republican candidate spouted wildly unfounded and malicious rumors about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. "They're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats," Trump bellowed in answering a question on immigration. "They're eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what's happening in our country, and it's a shame." (Trump’s rant has already been set to music!)

When Muir explained on air that ABC had contacted Springfield and was informed by its city manager that such claims were without merit, Trump suggested one might expect a city manager to say that. Yet other credible sources dismiss these claims. “There have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community,” Springfield police said. Even Ohio Republican Gov. Mike DeWine dismissed the immigrants-eating-pets claims.

By most accounts, the Haitians have settled legally in Springfield and assimilated nicely. They took jobs others would not. To quote the CEO of McGregor Metal, an automotive parts maker, about the Haitian workers at his plant in a Sept. 9 PBS NewsHour report: “I wish I had 30 more. Our Haitians come to work every day. They don’t have a drug problem. They’ll stay at their machine. That’s a stark difference from what we’re used to.”

Yet we live in a mean-spirited, deluded, pseudo-Christian society that increasingly forges its political beliefs based on claims unsupported by facts. Lawsuits about the supposedly stolen presidential election of 2020 prove this. Many court hearings regarding President Trump’s claims of widespread election fraud were evidentiary hearings – and those collapsed because lawyers such as Rudy Giuliani based their suits on hearsay and speculation. Giuliani hoped to find evidence in support of his claims but never did.

That’s a pretty sloppy way to practice law. As Giuliani explained of his approach to filing election lawsuits without evidence, “[a]ll those questions have to be answered, which you can’t answer at this stage of the litigation, so you put out all the allegations you have, the ones that help you, the ones that don’t, and then you work your way through it in the litigation.” Which is why many Trumpers foolishly still hold the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

As it so happens, I spent much of my youth in Ohio and, as best man at a wedding, spent a weekend in Springfield, an engaging, picturesque college town 45 miles west of Columbus. I also spent a couple of years working on the cops beat in Abilene, Texas, where I began my newspaper career. One lesson I learned informed the rest of my career: Complaints filed with the police department – say, complaints about immigrants eating people’s dogs and cats – don’t always prove true once investigated.

If you remember this lesson, you’ll save yourself a lot of grief in the newspaper profession. If you don’t, you won’t have much credibility in any profession. That’s not to say police don’t falter in investigations. But when your evidence is a social-media post claiming a neighbor’s daughter’s friend lost her cat and found it hanging from a tree branch at a Haitian immigrant neighbor’s home being carved up for dinner, your journalist’s skepticism should go on full alert.

First thing I did when Trump and running mate JD Vance lent their credibility to claims about Haitians eating neighbors’ dogs and cats in Springfield was call up online the Springfield News-Sun to see what reporters who know the community and know local authorities were reporting. Their stories indicate these claims are groundless. In fact, the mayor and local clergy have rallied to the immigrants’ defense. These reporters base their reputations and risk their jobs on what they report to the general public.

Should Trump and Vance be similarly held to account for spreading such alarmist claims without proof? Why not?

Other debate moments will linger long in memory, including Trump’s refusal to say he hoped Ukraine prevailed in its defensive war against Russian invasion and his refusal to shoulder any blame for the January 6 violence, including doing next to nothing as supporters brutalized police and stormed the U.S. Capitol to overthrow the 2020 election. But when he began ranting about legal Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets, I felt a moment of sorrow – not so much for Trump but for our nation.

Since the debate, Trump has recklessly expanded on this racist nonsense, contributing to bomb threats leveled at Springfield schools, hospitals and government buildings, a threatened shooting at Wittenberg University and a march on the town by the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist militia group allied with Trump. Does it exaggerate too much to say this town has been terrorized by misfits and malcontents of Trump’s Make America Great Again mindset? Has he again heightened the risk of violence for everyone?

The questions are relevant given a reported second assassination attempt on Trump, which Vance and MAGA followers blame on opponents labeling Trump a “fascist.” Yet Vance and his ilk yawn and look the other way as Trump continues to label his Democratic presidential opponent “a radical-left, Marxist, communist fascist,” which I’m not sure is even theoretically possible. So who’s inciting violence? It’s relevant to note most Trump followers dismiss arguments Trump incited the angry mob of January 6.

So far as singer-songwriter Taylor Swift’s post-debate endorsement goes, I admit knowing so little about her that my wife recently suggested a Taylor Swift documentary on what we call our weekly “Edification Night.” In watching “Miss Americana” (2020), I found Swift, then 30, somewhat naïve in her political thinking, but she at least offered a sunny, wholesome, forward-minded view of America in contrast to the dark and deceitful “immigrants-are-eating-our-dogs-and-cats” prism of Trump and Vance.

She also took a swipe at our post-truth age: “Recently I was made aware that AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted to his site. It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation. It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth. I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election.”

In short, Trump’s stupidly posting false claims of Swift favoring his campaign prompted this immensely influential American cultural phenomenon to endorse his opponent. This 78-year-old man’s childish response, posted Sunday: “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” And in a telling instance of his failure to learn the identities of his own supporting cast, Trump at his Friday Las Vegas rally introduced Reggaeton singer Nicky Jam as a supporter: “Latin music superstar Nicky Jam. Do you know Nicky? She’s hot!”

Except she’s a he.

I was impressed with Swift’s endorsement. As a former Republican, I probably should have been more impressed with the rush of Harris endorsements by more than 200 former Reagan, Bush, Cheney and Romney staffers, but Swift is articulate, thoughtful and grounded. In response, JD Vance on Fox News last week questioned whether voters “are going to be influenced by a billionaire celebrity who I think is fundamentally disconnected from the interests and the problems of most Americans."

I’m willing to concede the point, but why limit it to just one “billionaire celebrity” out there?

Bill Whitaker spent 45 years as a reporter, editor and columnist in Texas journalism, including a dozen years as Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor. He is a member of the Tribune-Herald Board of Contributors.

Shooting part of traveling Trump shock-o-mania shitshow

In an informal, unscientific survey after former President Trump apparently got part of his ear shot off in Butler, Pennsylvania, roughly half of my friends and neighbors acknowledged believing – at least initially – that the shooting had been a staged campaign event. Given made-to-order photographs of the event taken by mainstream news media of Trump – face bloodied, fist raised defiantly as Secret Service agents rushed him offstage to a waiting vehicle, a U.S. flag soaring overhead heavenlike – who in our doubting world wouldn’t wonder as much?

Lest Trump supporters erupt in indignant outrage that anyone believe this was anything but an outright assassination attempt, remember: For more than three years, Americans have been pressed almost daily by Trump and his sycophants to believe the storming of the U.S. Capitol, complete with attacks on police officers, was a plot provoked by disguised antifa activists and choreographed by the FBI to embarrass and undermine President Trump. A few days after the July 13 assassination attempt, Trump again touted January 6 as a “hoax” in a social-media post.

I was making Saturday night dinner when my wife said Trump, 78, had been shot at one of his campaign rallies. As a lifelong newsman, I ordinarily would have rushed to my iPad or TV to confirm this; as a retired newsman living in the propagandistic, conspiracy-ridden, “truth-isn’t-truth” Age of Trump, I instead wearily suggested my wife consult reliable Washington Post or CBS News websites to ensure such an event had taken place – and that, in any case, dinner was ready. Only a few hours later had I sufficiently galvanized myself to return to the murky depths of Trump’s America.

One reason for skepticism: To experience a Trump rally as I have is to witness several hours of delusion, anger, even torment. Wonder why most people in the risers behind Trump didn’t flee when shots rang out? By then, many had spent hours outside baking in the July sun, often without easy access to water. Some had passed out from heat exhaustion. When cognizant, they listened to a stream of incendiary, overripe warmup speakers whipping them into a dizzying frenzy of victimhood and resentment. By the time gunfire erupted, they were too weak and too transfixed to run for their lives.

In short, the shooting seemed part of the traveling Trump shock-o-mania shitshow where Americans are invited to view themselves in a funhouse mirror of whacky distortions and the carnival barker-in-chief will say anything and everything – often to the point of babbling, and just as incoherently as our sitting president but without the latter’s bowing to certain standards of conduct. If you study the faces of the crowd behind Trump whenever he says something utterly absurd, trips over a spoken gaffe or collapses into garble at rallies, there’s no flash of realization anything is amiss. The lights at home are out.

When a friend who voted twice for Trump raised the assassination attempt the other day, he focused our conversation on ballistics, logistics and security contingency planning. Not once did he express surprise or horror that someone had tried to blow Trump’s head off. Nor did my friend once hint that this must have been some leftist or government plot to assassinate Trump. Our conversation reminded me of my own conclusion the evening of the shooting: If you regularly blow things up and you’re indiscriminate in how you blow things up, don’t be surprised if one day it all blows up in your face.

Trump’s champions in Congress and right-wing media accuse mainstream media and Democrats of inciting violence against Trump by alleging that Trump, the Make America Great Again movement and Project 2025 reek of unadulterated fascism. Yet Trump and his followers show no hesitation in recklessly vilifying others as “socialists” and “communists.” When I walked onto the grounds of the Trump rally at Waco Regional Airport the morning of March 25, 2023, one of the first oversized banners I saw declared: “DEMOCRATS ARE COMMUNISTS,” complete with hammer and sickle.

So why is turnabout not fair play? Republicans have been calling Democrats “communists” for decades. Are Democrats not entitled to claim Republicans are fascists, particularly if they (and a great number of moderates and conservatives) believe it so? Project 2025 reimagines America under a super-presidency largely unchecked by courts or Congress; replacement of millions of non-partisan civil service employees with Trump toadies who could bungle everything from Medicare to federal disaster relief to Social Security payments; and a military leadership more loyal to the president than the U.S. Constitution.

And talk of incendiary: Even now, Trump stokes violence by continually insisting, without evidence, that the 2020 election was “stolen.” Yet some 60 lawsuits alleging this failed in the courts. And despite claims to the contrary, about half of the hearings were evidentiary. To quote several elder Republican statesmen who refuted Trump’s charges in 2022: "Claims that an election was stolen or that the outcome resulted from fraud are deadly serious and should be made only on the basis of real and powerful evidence. If the American people lose trust that our elections are free and fair, we will lose our democracy."

In fact, these hardline Republicans of yesteryear who investigated Trump’s allegations (including former federal judge Michael Luttig and Bush v. Gore election attorney Benjamin Ginsberg) declare in their “Lost, Not Stolen” report: “There is absolutely no evidence of fraud in the 2020 presidential election on the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any state, let alone the nation as a whole. In fact, there was no fraud that changed the outcome in even a single precinct. It is wrong, and bad for our country, for people to propagate baseless claims that President Biden’s election was not legitimate.”

Consider, too, the numerous pleas for leniency from many January 6 rioters, insurrectionists and camp followers in federal district court who now blame Trump for inciting the violence.

Recent example: East Texan Alex Harkrider, 36, a Marine veteran convicted of running rampant with a tomahawk at the Capitol. "False claims by President Trump that the election was rigged were made on media sources as well as by the president himself that the election system had been corrupted and that the integrity of the election should be questioned," Harkrider’s attorney argued. "Trump refused to concede. He showed himself willing to undermine confidence in the democratic process and in time managed to convince nearly three-quarters of his supporters that the loser was actually the winner."

Not that this is the only outcome for January 6 dupes. When Tyler Dykes, 26, was sentenced to almost five years in prison this month for assaulting law enforcement as an active-duty Marine on the Sixth, he demonstrated the extremes of defiance deemed acceptable in the Trump ranks. He talked about the unrivaled adrenaline rush he experienced at the Capitol, eclipsing even (he claimed) bungee jumping, and offered in court his unqualified endorsement of Trump for president in 2024. Dykes has already served time for participating in the racist “Unite the Right” violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Trump apologists now demand we at least show decency and deference to Trump after the shooting. But for a tilt of the head, he might have been killed. Yet the former president mocked the hammer attack on then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband (and the MAGA crowd laughed); dismissed a very real plot to kidnap a Democratic governor as “fake”; hinted that Second Amendment advocates might want to do something about 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton; and has vowed to pardon January 6 rioters, many of whom roamed Capitol corridors screaming for the blood of Speaker Pelosi and Vice President Pence.

A Pew Research Center survey this year found nearly three times as many Republicans as Democrats believe politicians should be able to express themselves with aggressive or heated language without worrying about the consequences. A day before the Waco rally kicked off his 2024 reelection bid, the former president vented over the prosecution case against him involving hush payments to a porn star. Trump warned of “death and destruction” if the case was allowed to proceed. Rallygoers with whom I spoke the very next day were divided over whether such threatening language was appropriate.

General consensus: “Oh, that’s just Trump being Trump.”

During the 2024 Republican National Convention, Trump declared: “The election result [of 2020], we're never going to let that happen again. They used COVID to cheat.” Does Trump mean he’ll engage in more behind-the-scenes skullduggery to siphon votes his way (which he clearly attempted in 2020) or does he threaten more post-election violence? When Ted Koppel visited a Trump rally in Schnecksville, Penn., in April, some aging rallygoers signaled the latter. “Be ready, just be ready for war,” a burly white man with a “Second Amendment: God, Guns and Guts” cap told the 84-year-old veteran journalist.

Not even two weeks after the shooting, during a rally in Ohio, Republican state Sen. (and Boy Scout!) George Lang proved the Trump movement has learned nothing: “I believe wholeheartedly Donald Trump and Butler County’s JD Vance are the last chance to save our country politically. I’m afraid if we lose this one, it’s going to take a civil war to save the country, and it will be saved. It’s the greatest experiment in the history of mankind. And if we come down to a civil war, I’m glad we got people like Smitty [Mark Smith] and the Bikers for Trump on our side.”

The crowd cheered.

A more recent University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats survey suggests that 7 percent of Americans – roughly 18 million adults – view violence as justifiable in restoring Trump to power. They also deem January 6 insurrectionists as “patriots.” Another 10 percent – some 26 million people – view violence as justifiable in preventing Trump from regaining the presidency. The Chicago Project’s work gauging political violence accelerated only after Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol to halt the constitutionally mandated certification of the 2020 presidential election.

What’s now really driving the MAGA crowd crazy is they can’t categorize the dead 20-year-old shooter as a card-carrying member of the left. He was reportedly a registered Republican and a gun enthusiast who left few indications of what spurred him to elude security, somehow scale a building on the rally’s outer perimeter and maintain his perch long enough to squeeze off several shots with an assault-styled rifle. British reporter Siobhan Kennedy reports the Trump 2024 campaign considered the shooter’s household in Bethel Park as one of the most sympathetic to Trump’s reelection in the neighborhood.

Investigation continues as conspiracy theories multiply, representing a frantic game of whack-a-mole for the legitimate press charged with timely fact-checking. It’s quite possible the shooter reflects the utter incoherence of a political movement driven less by ideology and integrity, more by idolatry and impulse. The fact the shooter’s cellphone revealed obsessions with both Trump and Biden and their schedules may well hint at how a bewildered, repulsed, up-and-coming generation in the Age of Trump perceives all of us “adults” who, whatever else, have been in charge of America for generations now.

Bill Whitaker spent 45 years as a reporter, editor and columnist in Texas journalism, including a dozen years as Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor. He is a member of the Tribune-Herald Board of Contributors. This piece appeared in the Tribune-Herald on July 27.

Riding the storm, directing the whirlwind

 

Two hundred and forty-eight years ago, a group of American patriots gathered to ratify a document written by revolutionary firebrand and intellectual Thomas Jefferson that, more than anything, made abundantly clear their disgust with unaccountable kings deriving their power from the Almighty. And three days before those patriots’ descendants celebrated the Declaration of Independence this month, the Supreme Court of the United States in a burst of judicial activism restored the very monarchial malignancy our forefathers fought against in the American Revolution. It recast the American presidency in a way that 18th century Tories and turncoats might have celebrated.

In a ruling that will forever define the legacy of the Roberts court, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote a long, tortuous opinion in Trump v. United States that violates the fundamental, all-American principle that presidents be as accountable under the law as the rest of us. It instead allows immunity loopholes for all sorts of corruption and criminality by a president if he or she can pass off such malfeasance as "official acts." One can actually feel Roberts’ discomfort in the blunderbuss of words he employs to hide the fact he’s defending a deceitful, narcissistic scoundrel who sought to overturn the will of the American people and upend the peaceful transfer of power that had been an American hallmark for 220 years.

In doing so, Roberts at long last ensures himself of the same ignominy that posterity bestows on hoary Chief Justice Roger Taney in the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision.

Roberts' reading of The Federalist Papers is clearly selective. He gallops right past Federalist No. 69 by Alexander Hamilton who in 1788 sought to outline for Americans the benefits of a president over a king: "The president of the United States would be liable to be impeached, tried and, upon conviction of treason, bribery or other high crimes or misdemeanors, removed from office; and would afterwards be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law. The person of the king of Great Britain is sacred and inviolable: There is no constitutional tribunal to which he is amenable; no punishment to which he can be subjected without involving the crisis of a national revolution."

Obviously, the 69-year-old chief justice has had a change of heart since his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2005 when he declared: “I believe no one is above the law under our system and that includes the president. The president is fully bound by the law, the Constitution and statutes.” Two decades later, overseeing a bitterly divided court hobbled by corruption, incompetence and incoherence, Roberts now signals in a ruling brimming with contradictions that, well, yes, the president has significant immunity from prosecution for official acts, whatever those acts might be. And that’s the problem with presidents claiming all sorts of powers beyond those set out by Article II of the Constitution.

Yes, one appreciates arguments for a strong, decisive chief executive, especially given that Congress is increasingly dysfunctional – more prone to showmanship and grandstanding than consensus-building and legislating policy. But the very act of emboldening the American presidency demands that those chief executives who exceed their “core constitutional powers” for self-gain be held accountable. That includes Donald Trump who, as sitting president, clearly conspired to subvert the will of the majority in a national election. Yet Roberts writes not only as if this conspiracy never happened, he seeks to hinder and confound and obstruct a federal trial weighing all the evidence and testimony, pro and con.

For graying Americans, the Roberts ruling showcases how effectively Make America Great Again rhetoric and its fanciful reweaving of foundational history has remolded the hearts and minds of some of us to be willing subjects, not discerning citizens. To quote journalist and historian Garrett M. Graff: “I wrote a history of Watergate that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize last year. And let me tell you: When Nixon said, ‘If the president does it, it’s not illegal,’ no one believed that was true. All of American history argues the opposite. And yet that’s exactly what the Supreme Court agreed today. The entire test of Watergate was no one is above the law. Today, the Supreme Court made one man above the law.”

In her powerful dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor makes this point: "After the Watergate tapes revealed President Nixon’s misuse of official power to obstruct the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s investigation of the Watergate burglary, President Ford pardoned Nixon. Both Ford’s pardon and Nixon’s acceptance of the pardon necessarily 'rested on the understanding that the former president faced potential criminal liability.'" Sotomayor adds: “Trump’s own lawyers during his second impeachment trial [for incitement of an insurrection in 2021] assured senators that declining to impeach Trump for his conduct related to January 6 would not leave him ‘in any way above the law.’” So much for that supposed point of law.

The lack of outrage by everyday Americans – and during the Fourth of July weekend – offers disturbing evidence of how tenuous our collective grasp of foundational American principles is. After a windstorm toppled a large red oak in a neighbor’s yard this spring, he voiced astonishment the tree’s roots didn’t run deeper, given the many years the tree dominated the front yard. The failure of so many Americans – perhaps defeated by the court’s serpentine legal reasoning, perhaps allergic to daunting news reports on complicated topics, perhaps just eager to go out and revel in carefree displays of patriotism – reminds me of that oak’s fate as the nation lazily contemplates another tradition-trashing Trump presidency.

The ruling also reinforces that bright line between what I call “classic conservatives” – those embracing classical principles of limited government and rule of law – and Trump supporters who call themselves conservative but unashamedly shed their principles whenever convenient, particularly in deference to charismatic, divinely dispatched strongmen who cater to their fears and feed their anger and into whose arms they unwittingly surrender much. And it highlights the fact that, in so many infamous authoritarian eruptions, the judiciary is often quick to falter in upholding the law. The collective capitulation shown by so-called “conservative” Supreme Court members suggests we’re witnessing that here and now.      

Many of us who listened to oral arguments before the court by the Department of Justice and Trump’s attorney in April marveled at how right-wing justices shifted and squirmed to avoid discussing the actual case at hand, retreating instead into hypotheticals. Yet those justices who ultimately dissented elicited the most frightening possibilities in this legal game. Justice Sotomayor asked Trump’s attorney: "If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person and he orders the military or orders someone to assassinate him, is that within his official acts for which he can get immunity?" Trump’s lawyer: "It would depend on the hypothetical but that could well be an official act."

Really? And that’s constitutionally protected now? In America?

On the very eve of this 6-3 ruling, Trump paused his many posts claiming victimhood by a “weaponized” Department of Justice to instead repost to his online followers a post accusing former Congresswoman Liz Cheney of treason and calling for “televised military tribunals.” He boosted another calling for the imprisonment of President Biden, Vice President Harris, former Vice President Pence and others. Would the high court regard such vengeful acts, were they to occur in a second Trump presidency, protected from prosecution because they qualify as official presidential acts? Or is only a two-month coup to hijack our government masterminded by a losing reality-TV president protected from legal consequence?

Trump celebrated the ruling on Truth Social: "Without Presidential Immunity, a President of the United States literally could not function! It should be a STRONG IMMUNITY, where proper decisions can be made, where our Country can be POWERFUL and THRIVE and where Opponents cannot hold up and extort a Future President for Political Gain. It is a BIG decision, an important decision, a decision which can affect the Success or Failure of our Country for decades to come. We want a GREAT Country, not a weak, withering and ineffective one." His campaign marketed T-shirts: "Trump 2024: Don't Tread on MAGA,” complete with timber rattler – ironically playing off the Revolutionary-era flag defying kings.

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, former guiding light of the off-the-rails Texas Public Policy Foundation, praised the court decision on presidential immunity as “vital” – hardly a surprise as he likely views it as more easily facilitating his goal of “institutionalizing Trumpism,” including radical measures in Project 2025 such as replacing much of the federal workforce with Trump loyalists, however competent. In an interview, he quite naturally cited Federalist No. 70, published March 15, 1788, in which Hamilton argued for a vigorous chief executive – also predictably quoted by the chief justice. Yet this essay surely didn’t negate Hamilton’s thoughts on presidents and the law in Federalist No. 69, published a day earlier.

For the record, Hamilton proved shrewdly perceptive. When Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied in the hard-fought presidential election of 1800, Hamilton surprised some by helping tilt the election outcome to Jefferson, even though Jefferson and Hamilton were fierce political rivals. So far as Hamilton was concerned, Jefferson at least had principles; Burr had none: “Mr. Jefferson, though too revolutionary in his notions, is yet a lover of liberty and will be desirous of something like orderly government. Mr. Burr loves nothing but himself – thinks of nothing but his own aggrandizement – and will be content with nothing short of permanent power in his own hands.”

Burr’s post-election intrigue allegedly involving shadowy efforts to prompt the secession of western lands and invade Mexico left him on trial for treason in 1807. He was acquitted but his reputation never recovered. By then Burr had also killed Hamilton in America’s most famous duel. Chief Justice Roberts actually cites United States v. Burr in his own Trump v. United States ruling, but in his bid to crown Trump with presidential immunity he contorts the broader views of Chief Justice John Marshall, who presided over the Burr trial. Whatever else on finer points in this complicated case, Marshall famously reasoned that “the law does not discriminate between the president and a private citizen.”

This much is clear: Alexander Hamilton anticipated Donald Trump 223 years before, judging from this 1792 epistle: “When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper . . . despotic in his ordinary demeanor – known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty – when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity – to join in the cry of danger to liberty – to take every opportunity of embarrassing the general government and bringing it under suspicion – to flatter and fall in with all the nonsense of the zealots of the day – it may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may 'ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”

In his smug interview on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, Heritage executive Kevin Roberts skates past such historical distinctions. He delights in the “radical left” going apoplectic “because our side is winning.” He claims the nation is undergoing “the process of the Second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” This raises a question given this historian and election denier’s suggestion that whoever resists this “revolution” – including presumably we moderates and anti-Trump conservatives – will be dealt with. Are we permitted to at least resist with, say, the ferocity and dedication displayed by self-righteous, delusional, far-right “heroes” of the Sixth of January?  

Equally disturbing is the court majority’s dictate – and without any constitutional originalism to back it up – that lower courts “may not inquire into the president’s motives … nor may courts deem an action unofficial merely because it allegedly violates a generally applicable law.” And, amazingly, the court ruled Trump’s exchanges with Department of Justice officials to overthrow the 2020 election in his favor are protected by presidential immunity because such exchanges qualify as “officials acts.” Constitutional scholar and Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin correctly argues this "radical break from history and the rule of law shows how far Trump’s lawlessness has contaminated the Supreme Court." Indeed.

Even Trump-nominated Justice Amy Coney Barrett balked at John Roberts' sweeping view of presidential immunity for acts hardly within a president’s constitutional realm. "Take the president’s alleged attempt to organize alternative slates of electors," Barrett wrote in a partial dissent. "In my view, that conduct is private and therefore not entitled to protection. The Constitution vests power to appoint presidential electors in the states. And while Congress has a limited role in that process, the president has none. In short, a president has no legal authority – and thus no official capacity – to influence how the states appoint their electors. I see no plausible argument for barring prosecution of that alleged conduct.”

Yet Chief Justice Roberts seeks to excuse a movement bent on dictatorship, if Trump’s words of recent are to be taken seriously. At one point, Roberts argues immunity may be warranted involving Trump’s self-serving efforts to pressure his vice president to reject or question Electoral College votes from battleground states sufficiently to allow Trump a path to electoral victory. Vice President Pence refused to do so, citing his strictly ceremonial role as defined by law, including the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution. Yet Roberts trivializes the key fact that Pence, in his role on January 6, was functioning as president of the Senate – and not as vice president.

"When may a former president be prosecuted for official acts taken during his presidency?" Roberts asks in his opinion. "Our nation has never before needed an answer. But in addressing that question today, unlike the political branches and the public at large, we cannot afford to fixate exclusively, or even primarily, on present exigencies. In a case like this one, focusing on 'transient results' may have profound consequences for the separation of powers and for the future of our republic." And thus he cavalierly justifies a bewildering, disordered decision that is more an assemblage of impressions and musings, dispensed with little or no solid foundation and providing no real resolution to our "present exigencies."

Freewheeling Justice Clarence Thomas expands on Roberts' scattershot approach in a concurrence that isn't really even a concurrence, questioning the appointment of "a private citizen as special counsel to prosecute a former president on behalf of the United States." It lands far from the immunity question, yet is perversely intriguing given a member of the Thomas household who, in the wake of the disputed 2020 presidential election, longingly contemplated "the Biden crime family and ballot-fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc.)" being arrested and "living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition."

Roberts’ tangled web of arguments for unburdening Trump, even as the court now returns the case to District Judge Tanya Chutkan to sort out to see if a trial is even possible, confirms that we the people are indeed the proverbial frogs in the proverbial slow-boiling pot. The Roberts court has given oligarchs free rein to buy elections and candidates in Citizens United v. FEC (2010) and unleashed an avalanche of anti-democratic laws aimed at making voting harder through Shelby County v. Holder (2013), which gutted the Voting Rights Act that, ironically, might have allowed President Trump to legally prevent the “election irregularities” that supposedly foiled his reelection in 2020. Yet this latest ruling is far more malignant.

For one thing, it’s astounding in its reversal of what so many of these justices claimed during their own nomination hearings. For another, it’s stunning in its cowardice. The former president has immunity in conversations with the vice president – maybe. The former president has immunity in his conspiracy to assemble fake electors – maybe. The former president has immunity in his rhetoric and presumably his dereliction of duty on the Sixth – maybe. The one silver lining is that this bag of worms is back before Judge Chutkan, whose decisive, tightly worded Dec. 1 ruling on presidential immunity revealed far more constitutional resolve than the toxic ambiguities offered by Roberts and his crew of Trump apologists.

Roberts’ Trump v. United States opinion – affirmed by two justices (Thomas, Samuel Alito) who arguably violated federal ethics law by not recusing themselves from this particular case and three more justices who owe their powerful lifetime appointments to Trump – clashes with not only the Declaration of Independence but the Constitution. The president has no legitimate role whatsoever in contesting election outcomes except as a litigant through the courts (in which Trump consistently failed in 2020). And the president certainly has no constitutional right to strong-arm and browbeat governors, state lawmakers and secretaries of state into violating the law.

The Roberts ruling signals not only the court’s plummeting legitimacy but our nation's decline. Consider President Trump's insistence in June 2019 that "Article II allows me to do whatever I want" or his Dec. 3, 2022, call for "termination" of the Constitution to return him to power. Then consider a post-presidential observation in 1913 by Theodore Roosevelt, one of our nation's most vigorous chief executives, yet one cognizant and respectful of our history and the Constitution in ways Trump and the high court are not: “My belief was that it was not only [the president’s] right but his duty to do anything that the needs of the nation demanded unless such action was forbidden by the Constitution or by the laws.”

Former federal jurist Michael Luttig, whose conservatism is beyond question, showed his contempt for the ruling by quoting American revolutionary Thomas Paine from “Common Sense” (1776): “But where, say some, is the king of America? . . . [S]o far as we approve of monarchy . . . in America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.” For his part, Luttig in February joined in an amicus brief that asked the high court: "What kind of Constitution would immunize and thereby embolden losing first-term presidents to violate federal criminal statutes through either official or unofficial acts in efforts to usurp a second term?"

The answer, it turns out, pivots on a court that has forsaken originalism and is soaring well beyond our constitutional framework, desperately snatching bits and fragments of text out of context to bolster preposterous positions, paving the way for arguably America’s darkest days. The answer pivots on the court’s awe of a constitutionally contemptuous political figure who seeks to “ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.” As Luttig says, "the decision is irreconcilable with America's democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law." Yet many who pride themselves as patriotic Americans without fully understanding the American Revolution, the Constitution, Jefferson, Paine or Hamilton will celebrate this ruling.

Sotomayor’s rousing dissent finale has been widely quoted; equally relevant is her point that the court majority “invents an atextual, ahistorical and unjustifiable immunity that puts the president above the law.” And quoting the landmark 1821 Cohens v. Virginia ruling by a unanimous Marshall court, dissenting Justice Ketanji Jackson adds: “As we enter this uncharted territory, the People, in their wisdom, will need to remain ever attentive, consistently fulfilling their established role in our constitutional democracy and thus collectively serving as the ultimate safeguard against any chaos spawned by this court’s decision. For, like our democracy, our Constitution is ‘the creature of their will, and lives only by their will.’”

Yet Justice Jackson’s insights draw from another time. One fears America has settled into a bread-and-circus era when many of us rally around leaders who entertain and arouse us with demagoguery, uncouthness and hatred for fellow citizens, saying things decency, manners and political correctness once discouraged. We care little if such leaders cheat on their spouses with porn stars, get caught enriching themselves at the public trough, talk of becoming dictators or try to cancel out votes of our fellow citizens. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed after his travels through America in 1831, “A man's admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.”    

In siding with Trump, the Roberts court also thumbs its nose at the spectacle of an angry, resentful mob of Trump supporters brutalizing police outside the U.S. Capitol and chasing lawmakers into hiding as it seized the building and delayed the constitutionally mandated certification of the presidential election. Had the mob stormed the nearby Supreme Court building, justices so desperate to reposition Trump for another destructive term in the American presidency might have had far more sobering thoughts about the rule of law in America. The Roberts court has lost its constitutional compass, let alone any moral compass. It is worthy of contempt and condemnation, infamy and irrelevance, now and forever.

Bill Whitaker spent 45 years as a reporter, editor and columnist in Texas journalism, including a dozen years as Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor. He is a member of the Tribune-Herald Board of Contributors.

MAGA CROWD READY TO HANG THE TRUMP JURY

Not content with efforts to suppress voting rights after unsubstantiated claims of a stolen presidential election failed to resonate in courts nationwide, Republicans high and low now target another feature of our flailing democracy: the rule of law and everyday jurors tapped by that law to decide the guilt or innocence of defendants on trial or, in grand juries, to decide whether sufficient evidence even exists for prosecution. For the uninformed, the Bill of Rights guarantees criminal prosecutions “by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.”

As usual when it comes to trashing American norms, 2024 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is at the root of recent threats of violence against jurors – in this case, the dozen who found him guilty on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to funnel hush money to a porn star. Granted, of all the allegations dogging Trump, this struck me as the most tenuous; yet it became clear during trial that Trump employed skullduggery and deceit to hide from voters in 2016 that he had sex earlier with a pornography star. Foolishly, he cooked the books to ensure her silence, thus cooking his own goose.

However convoluted the crime, New York jurors nonetheless decided the former president violated state law – and so a chorus of Republican politicians who supposedly cherish law and order lost no time in condemning the outcome, including the notion that New York jurors could ever render a fair verdict regarding Trump and that he had been due, at the very least, a change of venue. Trump eclipsed all in claiming injustice, labeling the trial “a disgrace. They wouldn't give us a venue change. We were at 5 percent or 6 percent [popularity] in this district, in this area. This was a rigged, disgraceful trial."

Not so fast, say no less than two high-ranking, Trump-appointed judges in a decision by a three-judge panel of the influential U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., rendered two days before the New York verdict on Trump. In a spinoff of United States v. Webster, Marine veteran and former New York Police Department officer Thomas Webster – one of the most ferocious of insurrectionists storming the Capitol on behalf of Trump on January 6 – argued that his own request for a change of venue in his 2022 criminal trial should have been granted.

Webster, 58, sentenced to 10 years in prison for viciously assaulting a police officer and related charges, argued that he could not get an impartial jury in the District of Columbia because its jury pool was “simply too Democratic, too connected to the federal government and too steeped in January 6th news coverage to produce 12 unbiased jurors.” The trial court denied Webster’s motion, reasoning the district’s size and characteristics did not indicate a jury pool – whatever its thoughts on January 6 – was prejudiced against Webster personally.

The appeals court panel affirmed this denial in its May 28 ruling: To paraphrase, one need not favor bank robberies to serve as an impartial juror in the trial of someone charged with bank robbery. Few of us approve of the storming of the U.S. Capitol, whatever our political beliefs. That doesn’t mean the Department of Justice case against each and every person charged in the violence and chaos of January 6 is necessarily guilty. Solemn jurors are charged with weighing prosecution and defense evidence and testimony to make a studied, fair determination in each individual case.

“We expect jurors to view significant criminal events in their hometown with an unapproving eye, whether it is the January 6th attack on the Capitol, a murder or an armed robbery spree,” the judges wrote. “Generalized disapproval of criminal conduct – even the specific conduct at issue in a defendant’s case – says nothing about a juror’s ability to be impartial in deciding whether a particular individual committed a crime or not. What the Constitution forbids is for a juror to hold a firmly entrenched view about an individual defendant’s guilt or innocence before the trial starts.”

In his suit, Webster notes Jurors 3 and 8 generally expressed negative views of Trump and his supporters. “I certainly don’t have a high opinion of former President Donald Trump and, by extension, I don’t think his supporters are particularly smart for supporting him,” Juror 3 testified during jury selection. Juror 8 acknowledged: “I wasn’t a fan of Trump … so his supporters, I mean, you know … some of them do get a little chaotic and they’re not fun to be around when they’re being wild around the streets.” Juror 13 shared that, as “a black woman, at that period of [Trump] being president, I just felt unsafe.”

Yet the judges note: “Nothing in those jurors’ statements suggests that they had prejudged Webster’s guilt or were incapable of deciding the case objectively based on the evidence. Webster’s counsel, in fact, was so unconcerned that he did not move to strike any of them. He also declined the offer to question Juror 8 further.” As for Juror 3, Webster’s counsel asked only if Webster was “at a disadvantage with” him. When Juror 3 said no, the defense counsel responded, “[N]o? OK,” and moved on. Webster’s attorney also had little reservation about Juror 13 after further questioning.

And what sort of potential juror should be struck from consideration for obvious or suspected bias? The appeals court again points the way, citing in the case a potential juror who “said that he did not view the trial as ‘a zero-zero game to start’ and, when asked if he could abide by the presumption of innocence, candidly responded, ‘I really, I honestly don’t think so.’” For whatever reason, this prospective juror was never seated in the case of United States v. Webster. 

What made any jury decision about Webster easy was what the appeals court in review described as the “overwhelming evidence against him, including at least four videos of the assault.” And to quote the federal prosecutor at sentencing: “Overall, the defendant's conduct and statements before, on and immediately after January 6th show that he anticipated violence, that he wanted violence and that he instigated violence. He brought with him his MREs, his NYPD gun, a ballistic vest, a military rucksack. He was clearly anticipating a violent clash.” 

It’s also relevant that, during sentencing, Webster himself acknowledged being played the fool by Trump and his political and media minions: “Unfortunately, I became swept up in politics and former President Trump’s rhetoric. A picture of voter fraud had been painted. As a veteran, that created a panic and fear in my mind.” Defense attorney James Monroe noted that his client was “disabused of any notion that the 2020 election was illegitimate.” Monroe blamed Trump and the Republican Party for turning Webster and “otherwise decent, law-abiding individuals … against fellow Americans.”

The two Trump-appointed judges reaching this decision about jurors, impartiality and change-of-venue motions are Gregory Katsas, a former deputy White House counsel under President Trump, and Neomi Rao, who once served under Trump as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. They rendered their decision along with Judge Patricia Millett, an Obama appointee who actually wrote the opinion on behalf of all three.

Yet the appeals court ruling sits uneasily alongside maniacal supporters of the man who appointed Katsas and Rao: Once again, we see Republican politicians recklessly and maliciously claiming Trump was railroaded. And Trump supporters are, once again, reverting to violent form a la January 6, threatening the lives of jurors, even their children. Yet these jurors were unanimous on all 34 felony counts, including one who identified as primary news sources Trump’s Truth Social media account and X, formerly Twitter, run by right-wing entrepreneur and conspiracy theorist Elon Musk. 

It’s also relevant that the New York jury was selected with input from Trump’s own defense team.

“The institution of the jury may be aristocratic or democratic, according to the class from which the jurors are taken,” French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville observed of juries in Europe and America in his seminal work “Democracy in America” after touring the United States only four decades after its constitutional founding. “But it always preserves its republican character in that it places the real direction of society in the hands of the governed, or a portion of the governed, and not that of the government.” In short, juries are “we the people” in action.

No wonder a neighbor of mine, a lifelong attorney who voted twice for Trump, exploded in outrage at the vicious threats leveled at jurors by Trump sycophants after a verdict was rendered: My friend knows well what those of us who spent our careers in daily journalism know: Jurors, who don’t ask to serve on juries but do so as good citizens, ordinarily take their responsibilities seriously – far more so than some privileged oaf of a defendant who sleeps in court, then departs to bellow, whine and trash the court and complain of being mistreated. It is a spectacle to indulge and thrill willing idiots.

So much for any remaining notion of the Republican Party being the party of law and order. If there's any other enlightening link between the broader Webster and Trump scenarios, it may involve the words of the trial judge during Webster's sentencing: "Now does he bear responsibility for it? Of course he does. But I said before and I will continue to say at every one of these sentencings, people who stand before me to be sentenced and in every other courtroom in this courthouse are in a sense victims too. And Americans of all stripes should understand that."

Bill Whitaker spent 45 years as a reporter, editor and columnist in Texas journalism, including a dozen years as Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor. He is a member of the Tribune-Herald Board of Contributors.

'EBJ' triumphed over Jim Crow, encouraged others to follow

During a funeral of more than three hours, a line of political and spiritual leaders, one after another, briefly took the spotlight at Dallas’ Concord Church to memorialize former Democratic Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, the Waco native and onetime nurse who over 89 years of uphill struggle surmounted entrenched Jim Crow barriers set up to stymie those of her race and sex. Yet all the platitudes paled alongside the tribute issued by Republican Congressman Frank Lucas.

“I’m deeply saddened by the passing of Eddie Bernice Johnson,” the 64-year-old Oklahoma lawmaker said in a New Year’s Eve statement hours after her death. “We worked side by side for years and I was proud to call her a friend in addition to a colleague. She was a trailblazer in every sense of the word and I was continually impressed by her dedication to public service. EBJ, as I affectionately called her, was an old-school legislator who sincerely cared about the cause of advancing American science. It was a privilege to serve as the ranking member during her chairmanship of the House Science Committee. Together, we passed generational legislation that will set the course for science and technology development for decades to come.”

Lucas added that such legislation "wouldn’t have been possible without her leadership and commitment to working in a bipartisan fashion.”

Let’s face it. Partisan lawmakers these days seldom issue such tributes to colleagues of the political opposition. During this same period former President Trump recklessly claimed “Democrats want to burn America to the ground” – an astounding statement for a man forever linked to the storming of the U.S. Capitol, undertaken to overthrow the 2020 presidential election and subvert the U.S. Constitution. Rolling up one’s sleeves, stowing incendiary talk and working toward genuine consensus rather than engaging in flamethrowing theatrics may well have been the key to Johnson’s legislative success.  

Granted, any book on great African-American lawmakers of the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries will devote thick chapters to John Lewis, Elijah Cummings, Bennie Thompson and James Clyburn while “EBJ” is likely to be relegated to the index and footnotes. Yet those who knew her say she wasn’t out to get the credit and wasn’t interested in rhetorical swordfights, notwithstanding her background as a Texas civil rights activist in the turbulent 1960s. As an enduring member of the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology and the Subcommittee on Research and Science Education, she steadily pressed for widespread science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education – understandable for a woman who only went into nursing after a high school guidance counselor in Waco in the 1950s advised that her dream of one day becoming a doctor was impossible because of her gender.

“Eddie Bernice Johnson was a quiet hero,” Democratic House Leader Hakeem Jeffries, 53, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, said at her Jan. 9 funeral. “She taught us that you don’t have to be the loudest voice in the room to get the most done, and that’s what she did. Don’t confuse the presence of dignity with the absence of determination. Eddie Bernice Johnson was both dignified and determined and one of the most accomplished legislators of the United States Congress.”

The richly informative biography in Johnson’s funeral program acknowledged as much: “Hers is a congressional career that is measured not just by the legislative results she attained but how she did it. For most of her time in Congress, she was in the minority party. To get anything done, she had to reach across the aisle and work with Republicans. She had to cultivate relationships, command respect, negotiate and remain persistent.” Consequently, over three decades on Capitol Hill she authored or co-authored more than 300 bills displaying an unusually wide range of interests and concerns including health care, veterans, voting rights, education, trade, economic development and combating sexual harassment. To quote great-granddaughters Kennedy Lee Winter-Johnson and Lily Rose Johnson during the funeral, her admonitions to the youngsters were: “Work hard every day and never give up when things get tough. Be strong in mind and heart. Always do the right thing even if it’s not fun.”

Or, to quote former U.S. Trade Representative and former Dallas mayor Ron Kirk, 69, also at the funeral, “And I want to say to those of you here who are not elected officials: Don’t ask us one more time what we got to do to make our country better, what we have to do to get rid of all the noise and discord. If you were paying attention to the life of this remarkable woman, she’s already given us the answer: Do the work.”

During a 2022 C-SPAN interview, Johnson recalled forming congressional alliances with other women such as Republican Congresswoman Connie Morella to pursue legislation that encouraged young women and persons of color to pursue rewarding careers in science and technology. All this culminated in the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 that boosted semiconductor research, development and production, ensuring U.S. leadership in technology that is the foundation of everything from automobiles to household appliances to defense systems. The legislation also expanded investments in "institutional diversity of research institutions and the students and researchers they serve, including new initiatives to support Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and other minority-serving institutions.”

In a bipartisan piece in The Hill – published the day Johnson’s funeral procession from Dallas to Texas State Cemetery in Austin turned off I-35 into her old hometown of Waco to pass slowly by the Doris Miller Memorial along the Brazos – Lucas and Democratic Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, both white, wrote how Johnson in her leadership posts on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology "knew that if we fell behind in expanding human knowledge and ensuring the workforce behind it was diverse, our nation’s future would suffer. She beamed with pride as President Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act into law. We now take the responsibility of ensuring the goals we set out to achieve with this law are realized."

“We needed the talent in this country,” Congresswoman Johnson told C-SPAN on the eve of her House

retirement after 30 years. “We were brain-draining other countries when we had people here we were overlooking, not getting them ready to meet the challenges of the future, all the way up to today. Just this week I read something that said, ‘Well, a college degree might not be the best opportunity now for good jobs.’ We’ve been saying that for 30 years, looking at technology and the skills that are needed. If I can’t think of anything else, the achievement of writing most of the CHIPS bill from this committee was something I can really be proud of.”

Johnson wasn’t the most eloquent member of the Black Congressional Caucus alongside such powerful orators as Lewis, Clyburn and Cummings. Nor could she rival the soaring rhetoric of, say, entrepreneur and SpaceX founder Elon Musk when it came to talking of making mankind a multi-planet species. I recall her once fumbling about trying to use the solar eclipse of 2017 to spur in the young an interest in science and technology. But she had the right idea. And the sort of mankind she talked of launching into the heavens strikes one as far more hopeful, more unified and more humane than the universe Musk seems to idealize if his controversial overhaul of Twitter or X is any indication with its nutty conspiracy theorists, propaganda ministers and hatemongers.

In recent weeks, Musk, 52, has embarked on a puzzling social-media campaign to belittle the concept of diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace – a Republican talking point of late but anathema to Johnson, who certainly wasn’t proposing that women and persons of color be tapped for key jobs without sufficient preparation and qualifications. As an African-American nurse hired sight-unseen by the Veterans Administration Hospital in Dallas, she was preceded on her hospital rounds by a white employee who reassured patients that Johnson would be acceptable in managing their care – "really the most blatant, overt racism that I ever experienced in my life," Johnson recalled. No wonder Johnson referred to the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology as “the Committee of the Future.” To quote former colleagues Lofgren and Lucas, “she was always so focused on building a better future for everyone – a future where all can pursue STEM, regardless of race, gender, background or ZIP code.”

Like the starry-eyed, paradigm-bashing billionaire, Johnson talked about travel to Mars and beyond but with a decidedly more inclusive vision. “She always thought about what we might gain and glean from the space program, the STEM program, to help not only the United States but the world, and what impact it might be to study those particular areas,” her second cousin, Army veteran and Waco Housing Authority official Gerald Bridgewater, 63, told me as he and others waited for her funeral procession to pass by the Doris Miller Memorial. “She saw science as more than something we just think about in terms of its just being science and space. That was a passion she had because she felt that, through those technologies, people could change and interact with medical and technical advances and all that.”

I didn’t know Johnson personally, though I worked with her staff in shaping several columns by her for the Tribune-Herald. She long worked (but without success) to gain a posthumous Medal of Honor for Doris Miller, the 23-year-old black sharecroppers’ son from Waco who during the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor in 1941 abandoned his menial duties aboard the USS West Virginia in a segregated U.S. Navy to man an anti-aircraft gun to return fire. Awarded the Navy Cross, Miller briefly toured the nation (including his hometown of Waco) on a war-bond drive before returning to battle duty. He perished with his shipmates on the USS Liscome Bay in November 1943.

Considering the racial and sexual discrimination she faced in Waco, Johnson’s optimism rates respect, even by those who might disagree with her politics. During the gathering of some 60 well-wishers near the Doris Miller Memorial, former Democratic Congressman Chet Edwards, 72, who began his 20 years in the U.S. House representing Waco two years before Johnson arrived from Dallas, expressed admiration for all she attained. He singled out her traveling alone as a young black woman to Indiana in summer 1952 to begin nursing studies at St. Mary’s College because Texas segregation precluded her from such an education at nearby Baylor University, despite graduating at the top of her class at A.J. Moore High School in Waco.

“Rather than letting that horrible injustice make her bitter, she used the spirit of Doris Miller to spend her life in public service with dignity, with grace,” Edwards told those assembled, noting the series of firsts she accomplished throughout her career in medicine and politics. “She taught me the power of faith and love overcoming the power of hate and discrimination. She taught me that each of us can make a difference.” He later added that her parents in Waco "taught her the values of faith, hard work, determination and grace. And Toliver Chapel Missionary Baptist Church shaped her faith and values."

Edwards considered Johnson an especially close friend. “My two sons were born 25 and 27 years ago,” he said. “Eddie Bernice gave them each their first piggy bank. My wife and I matched their savings and, over the years, it built up and built up, and they invested their earnings from Eddie Bernice’s piggy banks in the stock market. And two years ago, my 27-year-old son and his wife used Eddie Bernice’s piggybank money to make the down payment on their first home as a couple in Fort Worth. She just had that personal dignity and kindness.”

There’s a wonderful story about Johnson, near the end of her congressional tenure an engaging, rotund little woman of 86, quietly returning to her Capitol office on Jan. 6, 2021, only to encounter someone in the hallway who seemed lost and disoriented – someone she later deduced was among the first wave of Trump supporters to breach the Capitol, then under lockdown but for lawmakers and their staffs. Unwittingly, she asked if she could help him. He explained that he had secured an "all-expense-paid trip to Washington and he wanted to see what it looked like,” she told The Grio months later. “So I told him to have a nice trip. But I went in my office and locked the door."

Simple story? Sure. But considering the violent siege of the Capitol that she and her staff witnessed from their barricaded office later that day, mounted by a mob yelling “1776!” and “Our House!” and vowing to hang the vice president, the anecdote illustrates the clash of ideologies we now witness in America: one embraced by a person who quietly and through consensus-building worked within the American constitutional system to eliminate barriers set up to impede those of her race and sex and to provide equal opportunity to all, the other embraced by a person who likely didn’t know anything more of constitutional order and the founding framework than his idol did and was set that day on invalidating through brute force the votes of millions of fellow Americans, white, black and brown, in the election of 2020.

Who in that Capitol hallway was the real patriot?

Bill Whitaker spent nearly 45 years as a daily Texas journalist, including nearly a dozen years as opinion editor at the Waco Tribune-Herald. He now serves on the Trib Board of Contributors.

Celebrating Moore v. Harper on the Fourth 2023

 

Given the din of political and cultural strife marking our times, the Fourth of July 2023 is the perfect occasion to revel in a rare triumph of constitutional fidelity, one George Washington, John Marshall and James Madison would surely recognize. And while this development puts a massive hole in the keel of the 2022 Republican Party of Texas platform and spoils dreams of Republicans who believe Joe Biden is an “illegitimately elected” president (to quote the GOP platform), those who still believe in such founding principles as separation of powers and judicial review have much to celebrate. 

Especially worthy of this year's Independence Day fireworks: Progressives and conservatives on the Supreme Court of the United States coming together last week to consign to the trash heap of ideological claptrap the so-called "independent state legislature theory," a crackpot scheme that argues state courts have limited say-so over certain ill-defined election-oriented actions of state legislatures, even if whatever election skullduggery state legislators pass into law conflicts with state and federal constitutions. 

“It would be impossible to overstate the enormity of yesterday's seminal decision in Moore v. Harper," declared retired U.S. appeals Judge Michael Luttig, one of the few authentic conservative jurists still speaking out. "Not only is it now the single most important constitutional case for American Democracy since the nation's founding almost 250 years ago, it is also now one of the most important constitutional cases for representative government in America. Today, it takes its deserved place in the pantheon of great Supreme Court cases that give meaning to the Constitution's genius of a separation of powers – among the national Legislature, Executive and Judiciary – and also between the national government and the governments of the respective 50 states of the United States."

No doubt Judge Luttig’s enthusiasm has been tempered by decisions since Moore v. Harper, including the high court's embarrassing decision that the state of Colorado cannot legally enforce a state anti-discrimination law against a Christian website designer who balked at creating wedding websites for same-sex couples. Only now is the public learning that the supposedly gay man who supposedly sought the website designer’s services never requested such services, that he has been married to a woman for 15 years and that he’s a website designer himself. If so … oops.

The high court's 6-3 decision in Moore v. Harper is more bad news for Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, lately suspended from duty pending an upcoming impeachment trial in the Texas Senate over corruption charges but in December 2020 author (supposedly) of a Trump-driven lawsuit rooted in independent state legislature theory mechanics. Paxton's suit, which leapfrogged to the Supreme Court, sought to cancel out the votes of fellow citizens in four battleground states because election laws of state legislatures in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin weren't strictly followed. The reason they weren't strictly followed is because the nation was gripped by a global pandemic that killed more than a million Americans; state courts, governors and other state officials, in full crisis mode, made adjustments in election protocols so citizens could vote without risking their lives.

The nation’s highest court smartly sent Paxton and his preposterous lawsuit packing without a hearing.

Ironically, the state of Texas was guilty of the very sin Paxton alleged other states were doing. Key difference: Texas overwhelmingly supported President Trump's reelection while the other four states fell into the Biden column once all votes were counted. Because of widespread pandemic fears, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott correctly extended early voting in the 2020 general election to keep Texas voters from bunching up in polling places and contaminating one another. Texas Republican firebrands sued to kill this executive measure, but the Republican-stocked Texas Supreme Court in an Oct. 7, 2020, decision sided with the Republican governor.

Under the independent state legislature theory, the state's highest court and arguably the governor would or could not have acted without approval by the biennial legislature. The Texas Legislature's laws under such a theory would have ideally remained intact in all of their unchecked legislative glory, no matter how the crisis endangered citizens and constituents.

Supporters of this fringe theory argue that their concept of independent state legislature power in electoral matters is rooted in constitutional text, Article I, Section 4, Clause 1: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing [sic] Senators.” Yet this theory defies logic: For one thing, it would be ridiculous for a state legislature to be permitted to violate the state constitution that created it. And history indicates the Framers were wary of state lawmakers to the degree they included in the U.S. Constitution the Elections Clause to ensure Congress retained final power to set rules for federal elections.

"Marbury v. Madison famously proclaimed this court’s authority to invalidate laws that violate the Federal Constitution," U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority opinion pulling the plug on independent state legislative theory. "But Marbury did not invent the concept of judicial review. State courts had already begun to impose restraints on state legislatures, even before the Constitutional Convention, and the practice continued to mature during the founding era. James Madison extolled judicial review as one of the key virtues of a constitutional system, and the concept of judicial review was so entrenched by the time the court decided Marbury that Chief Justice Marshall referred to it as one of society’s 'fundamental principles.’”

The Moore v. Harper ruling, and by a Republican-dominated court no less, is also bad news for fierce partisans happy to set aside, during the likely 2024 rematch between Biden and Trump, state and federal constitutions that they supposedly cherish and that many as public servants have sworn to uphold. One concern was that, if Trump again lost key battleground states, state legislatures under his thumb could disregard the election returns and expand upon the 2020 scheme of electing phony electors to cast ballots in the Electoral College – and without interference by meddlesome courts reviewing and scrutinizing such actions against the texts of their own laws and constitutions.

Forget January 6. One can imagine riots in the streets and at state capitols if state legislatures were allowed to ignore the will of the people, even if citizens were acting legitimately through the courts as a last resort. Such pursuits, if pursued with even less regard for constitutional integrity than last time, might ultimately contribute to destruction of the Electoral College so many Trump populists loudly championed in 2016 when the votes went their way – and then tried to manipulate in 2020 through the independent state legislature theory when the votes didn’t go their way.

Regarding disputes by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, Thomas’ dissent towers as the most convoluted and most desperate, pretty well confirming that his reputation as the court’s most fervent originalist is now a charade, lost amid his wife’s equally fervent post-election efforts to overthrow the presidential election through such plots as the independent state legislature theory. It also scuttles the much-vaunted constitutional expertise of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texas lawmaker who volunteered to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court Paxton’s absurd 2020 lawsuit which, as a May 18, 2022, complaint about Cruz before the State Bar of Texas argues, would "disenfranchise over 20 million voters on factual and legal assertions that lacked any foundation and that state and lower federal courts had already uniformly rejected." The complaint notes that as fellow senators went into hiding as insurrectionists violently seized the U.S. Capitol on January 6, Cruz incredibly found time to dispatch a fundraising note: “I’m leading the fight to reject electors from key states unless there is an emergency audit of the election results. Will you stand with me?”

Judge Luttig’s optimism over Moore v. Harper suggests informed citizens anxious about Republican efforts to scuttle constitutional checks and balances can breathe easy and enjoy the fireworks this Fourth. Still, one can’t ignore the lasting damage the Roberts court has done to democracy through such decisions as the corrupting Citizens United v. FEC opinion (2010) and Shelby v. Holder (2013), the latter of which shelved Department of Justice scrutiny over even the most insignificant-seeming electoral changes and tweaks in states with historically dismal voting rights records. That opinion ironically ensured an avalanche of court litigation over disputed election law.

One must remember, too, that a third or more of us by now are unmoored from most founding principles and are fine with yet other undemocratic schemes discussed in the final desperate days of the Trump presidency, including subpoenaing ballot boxes in battleground states and even declaring martial law – something Texas right-wingers ironically suspected, without justification, that Trump’s hated African-American predecessor would attempt in 2015. Whether your brand of patriotism leans right, left or down the middle, our tumultuous past proves the struggle against those who would sink this wobbly experiment in democracy never ends.

Bill Whitaker spent more than 45 years as a reporter, editor and columnist in daily Texas journalism, including a dozen years as Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor.