'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.

Pondering the reality of locking him up

Less than three months after former President Trump began his 2024 reelection bid with a campaign rally here in Waco, he found himself under two indictments – one for falsifying records to hide from voters an extra-marital fling with a porn star, the other a needless, soon-to-be costly battle he picked with the National Archives when, in defiance of long-established law, he boxed up and took with him at the end of his embattled presidency hundreds of classified documents, including those showing just how vulnerable the United States of America is or isn't to some sort of attack.

This is the “patriot” leading the pack for the 2024 Republican Party presidential nomination. That should indicate to any responsible citizen how unmoored the party is from not just reality but matters of national security that once were this party's forte. Don't complain about national security in regard to our border policy and then look away from Trump's recklessness with our classified national security documents. This latter indictment is far more serious than Trump's bid to deceive voters over secret payoffs to sexual partners.

If that’s not enough, more legal problems loom, including whatever charges arise from special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s role in what clearly constituted an insurrection on January 6, 2021.

By now, most discerning citizens who value facts over rhetoric have read the June 8 federal indictment for themselves. It offers detailed allegations which prosecutors must of course prove before a jury of Trump's peers in the ruby-red state of Florida before a Trump-biased judge (at least judging from an earlier slap-down of this judge by a three-judge panel of the 11th Court of Appeals). It's an amazing document if true, demonstrating the former president's increasing resistance to any authority beyond his own, even the deferential but persistent officials of the National Archives. These folks were presumably only trying to follow the law set by Congress for them and former presidents.

The situation reminds one of an overly indulgent teacher trying to press an obstinate child to turn in his homework when due or at least soon after. Trump, 77, was reluctant to turn over classified documents that he not only coveted for reasons thus far unknown but left unsecured at two of his key properties, each of which has welcomed tens of thousands of high-dollar visitors from far and near. In resisting authorities, the former president reportedly jumped back and forth between three key strategies: stonewalling, lying or stonewalling and lying.

At various points, Trump allegedly deceived his own attorneys, which may explain why he has problems securing legal counsel these days. What attorney wants to get famously thrown under the proverbial bus by an undisciplined, high-profile client? Reporting by the Washington Post indicates he got into this latest imbroglio by heeding not his attorneys – some of whom tried to patch up differences between the government and the former president – but Judicial Watch gadfly Tom Fitton, who reportedly convinced Trump that he could legally keep the classified documents. Fitton, 55, who is not an attorney, could arguably be described as a right-wing rumormonger; the group he spearheads could reasonably be labeled anti-government, at least when Democrats are in charge. It’s just enough to make you wonder about all those people Trump fired with such gusto on “The Apprentice” – and those he kept on.

The indictment makes clear two other points: First, the federal government has evidence that Trump showed some of these classified documents to visitors who lacked security clearance – possibly just to impress them and shore up a wounded post-presidency ego; second, Trump knew the importance of securing classified documents, proven by the remarks he repeatedly made during the 2016 election when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Trump's opponent, was under a national heat lamp for extreme sloppiness in private emails involving matters of national security – an Achilles heel that likely contributed to her narrow election defeat amid Republican cries of “Lock her up!”

So here then is Trump involved in a mess of his making more serious than the Clinton debacle. Unlike Clinton, who cooperated by turning over thousands of emails to the FBI, Trump arguably committed graver sins by repeatedly lying to federal authorities – something you and I don't dare do without risking our freedom. Indeed, in reading the indictment, one realizes Trump believes he truly is above the laws the rest of us must obey, constituting the very sort of entitled, elitist and arrogant oligarch that John Adams – a real patriot, by the way – feared might one day prevail to the detriment of the republic.

To quote Adams from his provocative if obscure “Discourses on Davila,” penned in 1790 when he served as the nation’s 55-year-old first-ever vice president under George Washington and pondered the sort of nobility that might sprout in a young, unsteady democracy without monarchs and nobility descended from royal bloodlines: “Riches force the opinion on man that he is the object of the congratulations of others … His imagination expands and his heart dilates at these charming illusions.” Adams understood that while a nobleman – or, by extension, one who assumes its guise – “excites the indignation of many, and the envy of more, it still attracts the attention of the world.”

Yet Trump’s picking a fight with the National Archives, the FBI and grand jurors should leave any rational citizen concerned. Does a twice-impeached president forever tied to efforts to subvert the peaceful transfer of power in America believe this latest fight is prudent and in his self-interest when he so lusts to return to power? Does he not risk alienating at least some core supporters through careless regard for our nation’s security? What must this say of his judgment as a presidential candidate or a president? Is this the fight any smart business entrepreneur would wage? Or has Trump been manipulated by the likes of Tom Fitton? Is it then any wonder President Trump was convinced of a wild scheme peddled by renegade law professor John Eastman and others to invalidate 2020 election returns to his benefit?

No less than the fiercely right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial board, which has long functioned as a reliable apologist for Trump, acknowledged hard realities in a damning June 13 edition: "If Mr. Trump is the GOP nominee, he is unlikely to defeat Joe Biden. But if he did win, the document fiasco is what a second term would be like. He wouldn’t be able to deliver the conservative policy victories that Republicans want because he can’t control himself. He’d be preoccupied with grievance and what he calls ‘retribution.’ The best people won’t work for him because they see how he mistreated so many loyalists in the first term."

Yet arguably risking our national security matters little to latter-day Republicans, most of whom continue to support Trump's long march toward the presidential nomination despite indisputable evidence of his attempting to overthrow a presidential election he lost, his public appeal to suspend the U.S. Constitution in his favor and presidential transgressions during his tenure that would have shocked earlier generations of Americans. For those of us who identify more closely with the conservatism of our father and grandfathers, there is great resonance in the words of retired U.S. District Judge Michael Luttig in a June 25 New York Times column: “No assemblage of politicians except the Republicans would ever conceive of running for the American presidency by running against the Constitution and the rule of law. But that’s exactly what they’re planning.”

As the retired judge ruled in the court of public opinion, "Republicans are as responsible as Mr. Trump for this month’s indictment — and will be as responsible for any indictment and prosecution of him for Jan. 6.”

If I were a Trump 2024 campaign official, or even a follower who subscribes to his grievance-filled populism, I’d be horrified and livid at not only the former president’s refusal to cooperate over sensitive classified documents but his vow to appoint a special prosecutor upon reelection to "go after" Biden, “the most corrupt president in the history of the USA,” and “the entire Biden crime family.” I’d worry about revival of public interest in the mostly forgotten Mueller report regarding the Trump campaign’s ties to Russian intrigue. No, it doesn’t prove Trump “colluded” with the Russian government, but it makes abundantly clear to the most obtuse citizen that President Putin worked overtime to elect Trump – and that while hardly co-conspirators in a strictly legal sense, Trump and his family openly and warmly welcomed Russian help in the U.S. presidential race of 2016.

But I'm not a Trump follower, never have been, even as I've tried in countless interviews to understand his enduring appeal. Year after year, I'm mystified at citizens such as those in Washington on June 24 attending the Faith & Freedom Coalition, a group whose creaky traveling bandwagon of opportunistic blasphemers and political agitators occasionally rolls through my town of Waco, here to question the faith and patriotism and morals of others. I'm mystified at those who fervently claim to be Christians, fervently claim to be conservatives, fervently claim to cherish Jesus' teachings, fervently claim to value character and family values, yet demonstrate every sordid quality of membership in a rigorous cult of personality, ignoring in themselves the sins they see in the world about them. Trump, charismatic showman as ever, lovingly and passionately played his part as the Christ-like martyr during his appearance before this national assemblage. "Every time the radical-left Democrats, Marxists, communists and fascists indict me, I consider it a great badge of courage," he told the faithful to unrestrained cheers, applause, whistles and screams of joy. "I'm being indicted for you, and I believe 'you' is more than 200 million people that love our country. They're out there and they love our country."

Lock him up? Is it really coming to that?

As President Ford and, to a degree, disgraced President Nixon arguably understood nearly 50 years ago, Americans recoil at the notion of imprisoning former presidents and political opponents. It conjures up not a democratic republic grounded in the peaceful transfer of power but a banana republic with the stench of rebellion, tyranny and corruption. After Trump left power in January 2021, many of us – like or dislike him – hoped he would simply do what former presidents in America do: find some favorite causes benefiting the greater good to champion in retirement. But how is a constitutional republic to deal with one whose favorite cause is himself and who demonstrates such a willingness to turn our divided nation into a sprawling banana republic?

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. He is a member of the Tribune-Herald Board of Contributors.

And a Happy New Year from the Twilight Zone

                                                
Some of us gray in the temple remember when the Christmas season represented a period when many of us – Christians and non-Christians alike – at least pretended to put aside the ugliness of political and societal differences and display a little compassion, charity and understanding of one another. Many of us, believers or not, did so in recognition of Jesus’ teachings as outlined in the Gospel of Matthew as well as the hopeful prospect of a better year to come. Yet in 2022 one could see how far we’ve strayed from this custom in the very different social-media Christmas greetings of the current president of the United States and his predecessor, now a declared presidential candidate for 2024 and a still-bitter, flailing loser from 2020.

President Biden: “There is a certain stillness at the center of the Christmas story: a silent night when all the world goes quiet. And all the clamor, everything that divides us, fades away in the stillness of a winter’s evening. I wish you that peace this Christmas Eve.”

Former President Trump: “Merry Christmas to EVERYONE, including the Radical Left Marxists that are trying to destroy our Country, the Federal Bureau of Investigation that is illegally coercing and paying Social and Lamestream Media to push for a mentally disabled Democrat over the Brilliant, Clairvoyant and USA LOVING Donald J. Trump and, of course, the Department of Injustice, which appointed a Special “Prosecutor” who, together with his wife and family, HATES “Trump” more than any other person on Earth. LOVE TO ALL!”

Well, at least Trump made a stab at professing love for his adversaries and enemies (who tend to be one and the same). That said, you wonder how clairvoyant the former president is, given the assortment of investigations and allegations stacking up against him. Maybe clairvoyance ain't what it used to be.

Son Eric Trump’s Christian prophetess, Julie Green, informed the Trumpian faithful a few days before Christmas 2022 that God was sending a huge storm to wipe out President Trump’s enemies, specifically longtime (and long-beleaguered) public health official Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Biden, former President Obama, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, vanquished 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Facebook, Wall Street, China and Democratic Congressman and perennial Trump nemesis Adam Schiff. Thus far, all appear to have survived the very worst God could muster in terms of Winter Storm Elliott – if indeed God was behind the crippling storm.

All of which suggests we shouldn’t necessarily put politics aside during the Christmas season but instead quietly and earnestly re-examine how our professed religious, spiritual and philosophical tenets (assuming we claim them) actually inform our politics, let alone our daily lives. In a delusional nation where many of us now realize we would only recognize outright fascism if it came goose-stepping into plain sight with a bad haircut and toothbrush mustache, we must also now acknowledge we wouldn’t recognize and accept Christ’s presence unless accompanied by a sufficient array of Hollywood-styled special-effect miracles.

My wife and I have a Christmas Eve tradition of watching on television at least one of the many cinematic versions of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” in which crusty, miserly Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by four ghosts the night before Christmas. The ghosts manage to enlighten Scrooge about the worth of all human lives and the duty of better-off folks to dedicate themselves to helping relieve the misery, neglect and want of the less fortunate, including the poor and the meek. It’s not just a Christmas story but one that speaks of new resolves, new outlooks and new beginnings with another year fast approaching. My favorite version is an atmospheric 1984 production filmed in Shrewsbury, England, bolstered by a blustery performance by George C. Scott, who seems to have invested some of his “Patton” portrayal in old Scrooge.

This year, however, we watched for the first time a truly formidable version of the Dickens novella – a dark, angry Rod Serling twist on “A Christmas Carol.” Filmed in 1964 as a ghostly melodrama encouraging American support for the United Nations and the broader goal of global dialogue and international consensus, the production came about during a period of growing distress across America over war abroad and civil strife at home. As seen in his screenplay for the powerful 1964 Paramount film “Seven Days in May,” about a U.S. military plot to overthrow the U.S. government, Serling was more and more worried about the direction of the United States amid displays of intolerance, demagoguery, indifference and homegrown fascism. (“The time is 1970 or 1980 or, possibly, tomorrow,” the "Seven Days in May" movie poster warned.) “Seven Days in May” and the Fletcher Knebel/Charles W. Bailey novel that spawned it were inspired by the antics of U.S. Army Gen. Edwin Walker, a white supremacist who repeatedly made clear his extremist right-wing views while in uniform, leading to his resignation and decision to settle in Dallas to continue his political agitation, helping create the volatile environment that greeted President John F. Kennedy during his November 22, 1963, visit. Among those Americans earlier hopeful for a film version of the popular novel: Kennedy, dead of assassination in Dallas not even three months when the film was released in February 1964.

By contrast, Serling’s subsequent “A Carol for Another Christmas” practically qualifies as an expanded episode of “The Twilight Zone,” which coincidentally had ended its five-season run on CBS earlier in the year. The ghosts who come to visit and enlighten hard-hearted American industrialist and isolationist Daniel Grudge conjure up a realm not unfamiliar to those of us in 21st century America with our strife over desperate immigrants seeking to work and breathe free in the United States, anxiety over the imagined displacement of white Americans in favor of people of color, suspicion of all foreigners and bleeding hearts and, finally, the rapidity by many of us to embrace conspiratorial fantasies rather than hard facts as legitimate new sources dwindle in size and impact.

The Ghost of Christmas Past, portrayed by character actor Pat Hingle, showcases the anguished and the dispossessed of the times, in this case pitiful and forgotten behind barbed-wire fencing, exposed to the wintry elements, yet somehow finding hope and comfort in singing Christmas songs alongside small makeshift fires. The ghost poses damning questions to those among us forever rattling on about our individual freedoms as sufficient reason to disregard the public welfare and ignore the downtrodden, whether fellow citizens or those "unwashed masses" of other lands.

“If you shared a loaf of bread with them, how would you be relinquishing your freedom?” the Ghost of Christmas Present asks rhetorically. “Or if you joined other nations to administer vaccinations to their children, how would you desecrate your flag? Or if you had offered them solace and hope and comfort, how would you have made yourself susceptible to tyranny?”

“What are they singing?” Grudge asks the ghost, his concerns invigorated now that he actually sees suffering behind the barbed-wire enclosure.

“Foreign words – but not necessarily conspiracies to destroy you, Mr. Grudge,” the ghost says. “Just Christmas songs – and of those who don’t celebrate Christmas, songs of hope. They sang them in their language before you did in yours.”

The Ghost of Christmas Future, played by British actor Robert Shaw with the same vigor he invested in his portrayal of an obsessive, war-addicted German tank commander in “Battle of the Bulge” during this period, turns up in the rubble of a bombed-out town hall that Grudge recognizes. A stained-glass inscription at the front of the hall reads: “E Pluribus Unum.” The confused industrialist asks what happened, only for the ghost to allude to what years of failure to recognize and address social wrongs and press for constructive dialogue have finally yielded – warfare and an apocalyptic society ripe for tyranny and lawlessness. It’s a message worthy of our times when hatred and vitriol have made a mockery of the promise that social media once offered. Even now echo chambers in our civilization resound with threats against our once-sacred constitutional principles if we must share our freedoms and hard-earned rights with others with whom we disagree or whom we don’t accept as equals. So the question arises: What need is there then for a town hall?

“Attrition, neglect, misuse, a few passing catastrophes … time,” the ghost answers Grudge’s inquiry of what happened. “Of little consequence, really. There grew to be less and less need for a meeting place or a platform for debate. The American town hall, you will remember, Mr. Grudge, was a microcosm of all the meeting halls of the world, places where men could ‘talk it over.’ It seems we reached a moment in time where talk became superfluous, so now your town hall is past tense.”

Most disturbing is the arrival in the rubble of a clownish yet toxic character played in repulsive fashion by Peter Sellers. The character is adorned in a ten-gallon cowboy hat emblazoned with the word “Me.” He encourages his excitable, gullible followers assembled before him to recognize him as “the Imperial Me,” to which his sycophants cry: “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!” He revels in this near-religious adoration. And he warns of others from afar who want to infiltrate their numbers and overwhelm them.

“Now, then, they don’t come out in so many words and say that they want to take us over – they’re too clever for that – but that’s what they want,” the demagogue tells his mob of true believers. “They want to take over us Individual Me. And if we let them seep in here from down yonder and across the river, if we let these do-gooders, these bleeding hearts, propagate their insidious doctrine of involvement among us, then, my dear friend, my Beloved Me, we’s in trouble – deep, deep trouble!”

As entertainment, “A Carol for Another Christmas” is tough to watch, owing to the long, preachy stretches of monologue Serling’s long-winded ghosts deliver when more incident and exchanges of dialogue might have spurred the teleplay along its way. Nor does Grudge turn into giddy humanitarian a la Scrooge the following morning. Grudge seems more measured in what we can only assume is some small change of heart, maybe just in disposition and tact. Perhaps Serling intended his viewers to wonder and think further, but it’s hardly the joyous transformation readers of “A Christmas Carol” have been conditioned to expect.

Some cast members are striking, including lanky Sterling Hayden as the grim, uncompromising Daniel Grudge. In real life a decorated Marine in World War II who in 1964 gained newfound fame as an unhinged, commie-hating Air Force general who ignites nuclear holocaust in “Dr. Strangelove,” Hayden had seen his acting career suffer earlier from post-war dalliances with the Communist Party – some Americans briefly considered the Soviets our steadfast allies after the successful war against Nazi Germany. Other actors in the TV production never made the final cut, including Peter Fonda as Grudge’s son, a World War II casualty who was to function as a ghost on par with Scrooge partner Jacob Marley in “A Christmas Carol.” In fact, the son here is named Marley. Alas, Fonda is glimpsed only twice, and very briefly, as a voiceless apparition, then no more.

The ABC-TV production was deemed so bleak that it went nearly a half-century after its 1964 premiere (and, tellingly, three days after Christmas that year) before being revived by Turner Classic Movies in 2012. Outraged John Birchers conducted a massive right-wing write-in effort to protest the original broadcast. Yet today the teleplay  proves that even as society and politics change, they remain the same, if not more so. “A Carol for Another Christmas” is, yes, very much a piece of its times – the Vietnam War and racial strife at home only worsened after its solitary broadcast, aggravated further by the assassinations of civil rights leader Martin Luther King and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Yet the film resonates amid the madness of our own times, including the sorry spectacle of those willing to sacrifice neighbors, co-workers, even family members during a deadly pandemic by vilifying vaccinations, public health precautions, even doctors and nurses risking their lives to save infected patients. I remember a town-hall meeting in late 2021 conducted by Republican Congressman Pete Sessions in the University High School auditorium in Waco where resistance to President Biden included, amid a multitude of crackpot grievances and conspiracy theories and incomprehensible rants, one constituent’s insistence that Biden – "Brandon" – be tried Nuremberg-style for curtailing liberty and freedom through his administration’s zealous pro-vaccination efforts. 

Plenty of current events prove the continuing relevance of “A Carol for Another Christmas” but one more will suffice for the moment: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s deplorable decision to caravan busloads of immigrants, including utterly blameless children, from Texas to Washington, D.C., then dropping them off in front of Vice President Kamala Harris’ residence in 18-degree winter weather as an “own-the libs” political statement about disputed federal immigration policies. Count me as a critic of the Biden immigration policies. To me, they border on incoherence. Yet the answer is not Republicans' cheering on what constitutes human trafficking for political ends. Steve Vladeck, the Charles Alan Wright Chair in Federal Courts at the University of Texas Law School, correctly condemned this heartless gesture: “What kind of leader thinks this is the right thing to do? What kind of person?” Ana Navarro-Cárdenas, a former Republican consultant, expressed outrage at the callousness and hypocrisy involved, especially given many of the immigrants – asylum seekers from Ecuador, Cuba and Venezuela – lacked even winter coats: “Don’t lecture me about a made-up ‘War on Christmas,’ or tell me ‘Christ is the Reason for the Season,’ if you support staging this cruel stunt on Christmas Eve, using human beings as political pawns, throwing them out on the street in frigid weather.” Former Republican consultant Steve Schmidt was perhaps most blistering in his criticism: “We need less evil in America. We don’t need men like Greg Abbott. Worse, voters chose him [and just two months ago]. Everyone that did got to carry a bit of his shame this Christmas season. They get the satisfaction of knowing they made Christ weep on his birthday.”

Ironically, Abbott – a man who clearly envisions himself as a presidential prospect – tweeted on Christmas Day his seasonal greetings, confirming to one and all the transformation of so much of latter-day Christianity into a crucible of cruelty, deceit and hollowness, given his political party’s claim as one of family values and Christian nationalism: "May the joy of our Savior's birth fill your hearts today and every day." Included in his post was a passage in Isaiah 9:6: "For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting Father, prince of peace."

Abbott’s decision to play King Herod in a latter-day, real-life Twilight Zone scenario runs counter to his professed Catholicism, at least if Pope Francis’ own Christmas Day wishes are any indication. Apparently offered in a social-media post unrelated to Abbott's affront to Christian sensibilities, Francis reminds us of what increasingly confounds so many evangelicals today: “Today as then, Jesus comes into a world that does not welcome him, that rather rejects or ignores him, as we do so often with foreigners and with the poor. Let's not forget the refugees, the marginalized, people who are alone, orphans and the elderly, prisoners.”

Rod Serling’s Christmas ghosts couldn’t have said it better, but far more of us need to pick up the refrain.

A Few Benign Ghosts of a Newsroom Now Past

ARN Editor Dick Tarpley and seasonal help at the city desk

Merry Christmas Eve! While I seldom reminisce anymore about my days at the Abilene Reporter-News, I'm bowing to ghosts of Christmas past to conjure up a few newsroom spirits from long-ago times. Because of the length, I’m posting separately here not only a few newsroom memories but my thanks to longtime ARN colleague Roy Jones for his overly generous words about my quarter-century tenure at the Abilene Reporter-News — a period of such benefit, joy and edification that I cite Abilene, Texas, as my hometown even now. (Yes, I really do. Notwithstanding my early Yankee years, I remain a proud Dallas native, born at Baylor Hospital at the height of a seven-year drought that humbled much of Texas.)

I appreciate Roy’s “mentor-to-all” credit given me, even if it’s exaggerated to the extreme — a reflection no doubt of his Christian generosity and thoughtfulness as well as his understandable pride in his colleagues' work. Roy also kindly reposted for wider distribution my earlier Facebook post ruminating and rhapsodizing on the razing of the ARN building at North First (or Second) and Cypress just before Thanksgiving 2022. Regarding Roy’s accolades: While it’s true I assumed a number of diverse posts and interesting assignments in the Abilene newsroom, I regard myself as no more than a footnote character amidst so many more considerable talents, including Jim Conley, Bob Bruce, Al Pickett, Richard Horn, Warren Weber and Roy himself.

In an affectionate farewell column upon leaving the Abilene Reporter-News for the Waco Tribune-Herald in spring 2002, I reflected not on what I’d done in the newsroom and for the community (if anything) but rather what I learned under editors-in-chief Ed Wishcamper, Dick Tarpley and Glenn Dromgoole. Had I been permitted more room, I would have cited advice, insights and talents I picked up from fellow reporters, city editors, copy editors and photographers. The quality of journalists Tarpley (and others) hired was phenomenal, even as we young Turks sometimes questioned and even ridiculed his abilities and judgment, as all upstart reporters do with graying superiors and sage presences. Yet Dick’s insights into character, integrity and potential in terms of ARN personnel colored the newspaper long after his tenure as editor ended in late 1985. His contributions thus informed, alerted and entertained the paper’s then-significant readership across rugged, spread-out, always-hard-to-pigeonhole West Texas.

I remember three insights from Dick, perhaps not uniquely profound now but surely meaningful at the time: First, in reference to an ARN alumnus of enormous literary repute, Dick's caution that any story too good to be true probably was; second, regarding a young newsroom upstart in the early 1980s, that reporters should be better listeners than talkers, lest they drown out sources, stories and relevant details; third, Dick’s praise for my newspaper columns in the 1990s after I commented, during our last conversation upon my leaving Abilene, that my work as a daily newspaper columnist was a mere patch on the immensely popular columns of the great ARN Page One columnist Katharyn Duff, who reigned in that post for 18 years: Tarpley, by then retired but writing an excellent Sunday news column of his own for the ARN, pointedly disagreed, insisting my out-and-about Texana columns (started at the request of then-Editor Glenn Dromgoole) eclipsed Katharyn’s in that each had a beginning, middle and end and conformed to classic storytelling form and journalistic tradition. True? It no longer matters. Perhaps it's relevant to note that no less than Katharyn, a week after I began writing the Page One column in spring 1989, very charitably complimented my efforts in an endeavor I always viewed as a tribute to her own work — and then gently encouraged me to find my own style as a columnist rather than imagining hers as the only proper course. And, whatever else, I certainly never replaced Katharyn in the hearts and minds of West Texas readers, probably because of an easygoing, conversational style far more engaging than mine — the sort that conjured up Katharyn and her friends lunching and laughing and tale-spinning at Mack Eplen's Cafeteria just down Cypress Street.

Roy Jones, Jim Conley discuss culture

Of those other employees Dick Tarpley tapped and shepherded and helped advise in careers remarkable if not always appropriately heralded: I marveled at the glowing empathy my friend Jim Conley demonstrated that so ensured an authentic richness of perspective and humanity in effortlessly written prose, whether regarding a disreputable scalawag like West Texas flim-flam man Billie Sol Estes or a richly multi-layered, charismatic character such as globetrotting anti-communist and former Texas politician Jack Cox, both better known to a dwindling generation of Texans from the JFK, LBJ and John Connally era. (Jack, a Republican and a friend who lost his uphill gubernatorial battle with Connally in 1962, once told me that JFK never would have been assassinated in Dallas in 1963 had Jack won in 1962 because Jack sure never would have invited him to Texas.) I was in awe of the completeness and telling nuance in storytelling and the close and important knowledge of the law that so blessed Roy Jones’ much-cherished, highly readable courthouse reporting. I well remember, too, the vast carbon copies and printouts of past stories Roy kept nearby, always accessible if needed. I also recall the courtroom whimsy Roy shrewdly used to enliven his coverage, such as what a cattle feedlot owner said about the odor — that it smelled like money! Bob Bruce, by contrast, set the example for tidy conciseness and promptness, skills I never fully mastered unless lashed to the wheel of the ship. At deadline many of us in the newsroom — harried by city editor Gary Morton's understandably hollering "I need your story NOW! Just give me what you have!” — would glance over and see Bob, his duties for the afternoon edition finished and by then occupied with cleaning his fingernails before moving on to other matters.

Al Pickett and his sports crew young and old astounded me with their razor-sharp accuracy and eloquence on demand, accomplished under unbelievable deadline pressure — something I quizzed Al about during our lonely, post-midnight drive back to West Texas after jointly covering a big high-school playoff game in the biting cold in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. (I was doing last-minute color for the paper that night.) I could write fast but never with such ballsy confidence and finesse as the ARN sportswriters. From the ARN city desk, too, I watched Warren Weber offer passing pearls of wisdom about better writing on the fly (likely borrowed from his well-stocked home library of Hemingway, whose lean style shaped more than one generation of American journalists). More importantly, he calmly counseled reporters skeptical about particular assignments on just how much better and more rewarding their labors might be if they earnestly invested themselves in the task — advice I tried (however successfully) to emulate during my own subsequent tours of duty as a city editor in Abilene and Waco — duties, incidentally, for which I had almost no training except for the sterling examples provided by Warren and other long-suffering city editors at the ARN.

Bill and Richard gauge wine, the news

And there was ever-modest, witty, thoughtful, intellectually curious Richard Horn, who evenwhen consigned to rigorous desk duties such as his all-too-brief tenure as ARN opinion editor was constantly fleeing the newsroom to attend town-hall and city council meetings to enrich his newspaper editorials and columns. When I abandoned the ARN city desk to personally pursue the endangered Concho water snake with herpetologist Okla Thornton one day in summer 1986, my intrepid companion was none other than Richard who, like me, couldn’t resist an outing that one ARN reporter had already quit over. Our efforts along the picturesque Concho River and our subsequent coverage inspired further research that found the harmless little water snake wasn’t as endangered or threatened as originally thought, ultimately clearing the way for Ivie Reservoir (or, as some of us oldtimers like to say, Stacy Dam, out of respect for the small community obliterated by reservoir waters in parched West Texas). How I miss those early evenings Richard and I gathered at Cypress Street Station, right across the street from the ARN, where we toasted the day's hard-won victories and lessons with a glass of wine and we dissected news of the day and intrigue of the newsroom. We were such regular and animated sights at the bar that Cypress Street Station proprietor Brian Green proposed framed artwork of us sitting in the bar, which out of modesty we vigorously discouraged.

I was awestruck at so many of my colleagues, including ARN photographers David Kent, Gerald Ewing, John Best and Don Blakley, who in the darkroom and on the scene taught me so much about picture composition and urgent, up-close-and-personal photography, the sort that constitutes craft but very often rivals art. Such is daily journalism, warts and all.

Even in retirement, some of us toil in journalism. At the bidding of pal and former boss Steve Boggs, I continue to write rigorously researched opinion columns and editorials (some actually invested with shoe leather and moxie) and edit the occasional columns of community colleagues on the Waco Tribune-Herald Board of Contributors as well as other columnists. (I thought ARN editors, in challenging years when shrinking corporate budgets threatened to strangle newsroom capabilities, were shrewdly resourceful in tapping experienced ARN exes for specific assignments and part-time duties including seasoned, all-knowing veterans Larry Zelisko, Scott Kirk and Jerry Reed.) Warren and Josie Weber, standout veterans in the newspaper profession, tutor budding journalists at Pima Community College in Tucson. Many former colleagues, while retired or now engaged in other honorable professions, so far as I know continue to champion this honorable and increasingly misunderstood profession, even as family members and friends and neighbors sometimes echo rhetoric of our being "the enemy of the people,” often voiced from perspectives of willful ignorance hard to imagine being so prevalent just a few decades ago. Other colleagues including Dick Tarpley, Bob Bruce, Katharyn Duff, Gerald Ewing, Don Blakley and Gary Morton are no longer around to hear such blasphemy.

To newspaper supporter and retired nonprofit leader Doug Worthington’s fun questions to Roy and others in Roy's Facebook reposting of my earlier thoughts on the razing of the ARN building, the array of collectible beer bottles in my newsroom office of some 15 years could survive only so many moves later on and have now joined their more common cousins in the landfill. And Roy was right. I didn’t drink from most of them but collected them from well-traveled colleagues (such as Roy from his military travels). And my newspaper dispatches from a riotous river canoe trip came as I traversed the Texas Colorado, not the Brazos. Some “amateur writer” of dubious repute wrote of a canoe trip down the Brazos — and, yes, his reflections gained some repute. (OK, I'm joking — John Graves' "Goodbye to a River" remains an absolutely stellar piece of writing, required reading for anyone interested in Texas literature.)

As for another question that arose among ARN exes about favorite parts of the building now razed and gone, I claim rich memories from just about every nook and cranny of the second-floor newsroom, though perhaps most especially the long, darkly lit, carpeted corridor behind the newsroom whose windows showcased, in all its magnificence, the mighty ARN printing press — like the work of so many of us once at the Abilene Reporter-News and other newsrooms across America, now consigned to history.

Will Supremes come after other rights next?

When I learned of an early draft of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion on the future of abortion as a constitutional right surfacing on Politico last week, I balked as a skeptical journalist out of concern for its being a fake. However, when I finally chanced a look at the first 20 or so pages, I quickly recognized Alito's personality in the writing – snarky, intolerant, pugnacious and, whatever else, remarkably straightforward.

In short, genuine to the letter, something Chief Justice John Roberts confirmed the following day, even as Roberts stressed that the written opinion was a draft, certain to be tweaked and revised by concurring justices of which there is almost certainly an easy majority. However the opinion is ultimately refined, the outcome seems sure in this forceful, uncompromising text: The high court’s long-anticipated reassessment of Roe v. Wade is about to strip away federal protections that almost a half-century ago invalidated Texas law criminalizing abortion and gleaned from the almighty Fourteenth Amendment a right to privacy that insulates a woman’s choice of whether to pursue an abortion.

Thereafter, this right will be left to the states, which history proves have an abysmal record of protecting the rights of certain citizens. And while 78 percent of Texas voters in a recent University of Texas at Austin poll may well believe abortions should be allowed in some form, don’t bet the house on that sentiment manifesting itself in the form of actual votes. So far as Texas goes, a 2021 state “trigger” law starts a 30-day countdown toward banning most abortions once the formal ruling from the Supreme Court is issued, presumably consigning to the trash heap a bizarre anti-abortion law encouraging nosy and judgmental Texans to sue for cash bounties any neighbors, co-workers or family members they find helping facilitate abortions, exempting those who actually received the abortions.

Even alongside controversial issues such as immigration, health care and gun rights, abortion is unique. In an era that condemns compromise, abortion is the one issue that absolutely demands cooler heads and societal and political compromise and savvy leadership if the life of the unborn is sacred and the rights of the mother are to be respected in ways that men in other matters demand to be respected. Indeed, many men vigorously resisting masking mandates and vaccinations during the pandemic have used the very same rhetoric that women have in resisting government’s telling them what they could and could not do regarding their own bodies.

Anti-abortion protesters once regularly likened abortion to slavery, but that’s a colossally flawed argument for their position – a former slave could indeed survive free, even though some whites for generations openly doubted the abilities of African Americans in individual subsistence; a former master could survive without a slave, certain hardships notwithstanding – the sort that slave owner Thomas Jefferson, for all his soaring words about liberty in the Declaration of Independence, was personally unwilling to accept. The abortion issue, by contrast, has dealt with the solitary instance when two lives are caught up in one physical body for the better part of a year. So whose rights prevail? Is a legitimate and workable balance of these human rights even possible in an age of extremes? Is it relevant? Has it even been possible in recent decades with one side screaming “baby killers” and invoking fuzzily interpreted biblical verses instead of fuzzily interpreted constitutional passages? Has it even been possible with pro-choice forces stridently accusing the other side of hiding their true motives in the debatable term “pro-life” and actually pressing an oppressive mix of Puritanism and fascism in trying to rob women of uniquely tailored rights that arguably ought to be respected to the degree Second Amendment rights are respected? Many Texas feminists note, and with some justification, that “pro-life” forces are largely AWOL in fighting for life-saving measures that might reverse Texas’ disgraceful reputation of having highest rate of uninsured women of childbearing age, the highest rate of uninsured children and the highest repeat teen-pregnancy rate.   

“Back in 1974, my wife and I did murder our own child [through abortion] and I suffer almost daily from that,” Waco attorney, Army veteran and former McLennan County Republican Party chairman Jon Ker told the Texas House Public Health Committee last year in favor of this state “trigger” bill while chairing the Abolish Abortion Subcommittee of the State Republican Executive Committee. “I do know the effects of what abortion can do, even from a father’s perspective, and that is just something that needs to be – the reprehensible thing of abortion needs to be abolished in our state and in our nation because it hurts everybody. And I would like to say one other thing and then I’ll quit: That life inside that mother is not the mother’s life. When we say that it’s a choice or the mother’s health, we’re [suggesting] that that life within that mother is not a separate life, and it is separate and that life under our founding documents needs to be protected.”

During the 2021 legislative session, other presumably equally sincere pro-life advocates lambasted the idea of the state of Texas waiting for the Supreme Court of the United States to finally get around to striking down the constitutionality of one’s right to an abortion. Some argued Texas should ignore the highest court in the land, ban abortion statewide to save unborn lives and secede from the United States if necessary. And more and more, frustrated pro-life advocates citing holy scripture and touting Christian values have abandoned the long-accepted view that young women seeking abortions are themselves innocent and misguided victims. “I see [that] women who have abortions are not seen as criminals, and I wonder why,” a Houston woman told the Texas House Public Health Committee shortly before Ker testified. “I know it’s partially because abortion is kind of an anesthetized term, but what’s really happening is child sacrifice. These precious human lives are being sacrificed to glorify women’s freedom of choice.” She cited Isaiah 1:17: “Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed.”

And all this aforementioned diversity of opinion is just on the pro-life side. A Pew Research Center national survey conducted in March and part of a Pew report released Saturday morning found that while Republicans and Democrats have long been on opposite ends of the issue, the 42 percentage-point partisan gap today is considerably larger than it was in the recent past: “The change in attitudes has come almost entirely among Democrats: Currently, 80 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, up from 72 percent in 2016 and 63 percent in 2007. Republicans’ views have shown far less change over time: Currently, 38 percent of Republicans and GOP leaners say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. In many ways, the partisan divisions over whether abortion should generally be legal in the United States tell only part of the story. While most Democrats say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, sizable shares favor restrictions on abortion under certain circumstances. And while most Republicans favor making abortion illegal in all or most cases, majorities favor exceptions in cases of rape or when the life of the woman is at risk.”

In short, many of us – me included – believe abortion is a right that reaffirms the long-suppressed rights of women in America and in history, even if that controversial right is tempered in the way everything from the right of free and provocative speech to the right to bear arms openly or not is tempered. Yet many of us who argue for this nuanced position are clearly caught in the crossfire of those whose principles forbid compromise, all too similar to what we see in long-raging debates over gun rights in Texas and beyond.

The Texas Legislature has certainly tested the limits of nuance and the law. While polls suggested Texans believed the comprehensive anti-abortion legislation passed by the Legislature during the summer of 2013 was excessive in some respects – such as tying up abortion clinics in regulations some say were clearly designed to shutter them – many actually approved of that law’s basic tenet that abortions be forbidden after 20 weeks. That meant a bracing realization for Democratic state senator and abortion rights advocate Wendy Davis in her uphill (and unsuccessful) bid to employ that issue in a 2014 gubernatorial campaign: She would have to broaden her platform beyond women’s health even as she marshaled women outraged by the new state law – a tricky balance, complicated by the fact many of us may stand up for certain abortion rights in principle but are aloof from its potential relevance in the lives of marginalized women. “There are enough women in this state that, if she articulates her message right, they could mobilize around this issue,” Ashley Blinkhorn, 25, a recent arrival from Florida astonished at the state of women’s rights in Texas, told me during a rally at Waco’s Poppa Rollo’s pizza restaurant, co-owned by Democratic activist and educator Mary Duty. Others at this event also wanted Davis to champion women’s rights, up to and including abortion rights. Carole Hanks told me that Davis needed to battle a political system in Texas that supplants a woman’s right to make decisions about her own health: “If a woman wants to carry a baby to term, that should be her decision and no one else’s.” Meanwhile, a big-screen TV replayed, to everyone’s delight, Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s wife Anita acknowledging that abortion could be a “woman’s right” — a remark her husband later walked back.

Justice Alito gets this much right at the very outset of his 98-page opinion: “Abortion presents a profound moral issue on which Americans hold sharply conflicting views.” The basic thrust in his draft opinion insists that not only is the right to a medical abortion mentioned nowhere in the U.S. Constitution but the legal scaffolding supporting it and the rights to contraceptives, racially mixed marriages and gay marriages – the fundamental and cherished right to privacy – is also mentioned nowhere in the Constitution. He stresses that abortion ranks as a special concern to the court in contrast to these other hard-earned rights because of its threat to the lives of the unborn.

Yet given the hobbling legitimacy of the Roberts court in survey after survey over embarrassments up to and including the scandal of the leaked draft opinion; heated calls for ethics reform for the high court after texts by the politically bonkers wife of right-wing Justice Clarence Thomas surfaced proposing a virtual coup d'état (texts followed by her husband’s failure to recuse himself from cases related to the insurrection at the Capitol); and high court nominees who clearly will say anything before Senate Judiciary Committee members to get plum lifetime appointments, a question must arise about this court and its supposed integrity: Who amidst all this can believe these politicized justices won't soon come after other “rights"? Conservative gadfly Ben Shapiro and other emboldened right-wing zealots have already signaled they're coming after gay marriage next. Some Republican senators during stormy confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson raised questions about past court decisions justifying such rights as that allowing a person of one race to marry one of another race (though one might well assume that on a court where the racially mixed marriage of Justice Thomas and his wife Ginni are given proper deference, this conservative attack would hold very little sympathy). And some Republicans in Texas and beyond are now discussing legislation to prosecute women who dare travel across state lines to secure an abortion or penalize those organizations that dare aid them – an idea that would seem to conflict with the right to freely travel in the United States of America as well as the Thirteenth Amendment against enslavement. The unrepentant tone in the Alito draft practically invites all malcontents, theocrats and out-and-out fascists to launch further combat in our divisive culture wars, condemning our nation to more vicious infighting and resentment and misunderstanding as the global threats to American democracy and our very lives mount around us.

In his February draft, Justice Alito repeatedly dismisses the reasoning of past justices (nearly to the point of insulting them) in his insistence that the right to an abortion is mentioned nowhere in the Constitution. He’s right, of course, but there’s also no mention in the Constitution about, say, allotting free speech rights to corporations in the form of unlimited and corrupting cash to political entities, per the Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission ruling of 2010, which Alito supported. And that court decision has enriched already wealthy elites and widened our societal and political divide through corporate titans and noisy billionaires eager to game the constitutional system for their own ends, even as they sometimes play populist puppeteer to the masses.

And regarding that right to privacy upon which some arguments for abortion rights have relied: Given that some of us believe the high court has succumbed to unceasing political pressure, Alito and concurring justices best be wary of the capricious far right, increasingly alone in granting them legitimacy: Privacy has been cited as a constitutionally relevant right by conservatives in everything from filling out U.S. Census forms (a tea-party gripe in 2010) to gun-ownership registries, which some fear will allow the government to readily confiscate our home weaponry when it finally mutates into dictatorship. McLennan County Sheriff Parnell McNamara specifically mentioned this latter scenario as a concern when I interviewed him a couple of months ago. It was part of his broader concern back in January 2013 when he surprised some constituents by insisting he would refuse to enforce new federal laws restricting access to guns or ammunition, a position many sheriffs took after a December 2012 mass shooting at a Connecticut elementary school that left 20 children and six staff members dead. The slaughter had prompted calls for new measures against gun violence. Surprisingly, pro-life forces so dedicated to the lives of the unborn went mostly mum in this debate over killing sprees that claimed the lives of innocent women and children, confirming certain suspicions voiced by pro-choice forces all along.

Alito makes a strongly originalist argument for leaving abortion questions to the states, including the very voters whom he has helped confound through court opinions over the years undermining voting rights and perpetuating gerrymandering abuses. And his rationale in the draft opinion that certain unspecified rights must have at least some grounding in history fails to acknowledge that for the past half-century abortion rights have been consistently accepted and even embraced as a relevant if carefully regulated right by a majority of our fellow citizens in survey after survey after survey. And the past half-century going back to the Nixon era and the Vietnam War and women’s liberation and campus unrest and civil rights surely counts as history critical to democracy. True, Alito says the court has long determined rights by how “deeply rooted” they are in our history. Yet this claim proves Alito’s blindness – and likely that of other justices in the anticipated majority – to the rights of many Americans not as personally fortunate as those high justices. Deeply rooted? Consider our deeply rooted history of slavery and Jim Crow laws and Indian eradication and, yes, the tardiness of citizens in granting the Nineteenth Amendment. Dred Scott, anyone? Alito fails to realize that, to note it again, the American saga has always been one of discussion and debate, up to the point of violence and disunion, over who in our vast and increasingly diverse numbers rates full rights – and who doesn’t.  

Finally, Alito pointedly notes how legal schemes of past justices not only fail to pass constitutional muster but “have enflamed debate and deepened division” among Americans. Right again, but one reason past court decisions haven’t gained traction or acceptance is because those in Alito’s own political party have repeatedly enflamed segments of society against these rulings, demonstrated in everything from local boycotts of Girl Scout cookie drives to threats of outright secession. Support for overturning Roe has become a virtual litmus test in the Republican Party – and not only for GOP candidates seeking executive and legislative positions but for supposedly unbiased federal court nominees pressed by Republicans for lifetime appointments. (And, yes, the same charge can be leveled at Democrats.)   

If certain past justices of the Supreme Court of the United States – many of them Republican – are guilty of anything in Roe v. Wade and the Planned Parenthood of Eastern Pennsylvania v. Casey ruling tempering that right in 1992, it’s in trying to establish a reasonable constitutional framework for a safe medical recourse uniquely important to some women in an era of newfound liberation, even if this right didn’t quite constitute an absolute right. But then what right is absolute? What right should be absolute?

When all is said and done by the current court in the days and weeks to come, many women and those who love them and fight for their rights may well realize that the rights of a pregnant woman reluctant for whatever reason to give birth and the rights of an unborn child to one day walk free among us were pretty well balanced by high courts of the past with some reasonable restrictions by states. At least, they were before state legislators began pushing the limits of what was reasonable and a handful of justices on this court, bowing to political expectations inherent in their appointments and confirmations, upset the equilibrium and risked enflaming passions and deepening our divide even more than Justice Alito imagines or cares.

This is an expanded version of a column published in the Waco Tribune-Herald on May 8.