Rural White Rage - A Review

 

Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, (NY: Random House, 2024), 249 page

White Rural Rage examines the white rural population as a minority block of angry, threatening, and violent voters ready to empower Donald Trump and the Republican Party to bring down democracy in exchange for arbitrary rule. The authors explain in their prologue they write as a warning to complacent members of the majority who might be discounting the threat.

The authors develop their arguments in eight chapters where the first chapter defines four compounding causes of our dangerous politics. They list and give brief descriptions of the four causes: 1. white despair, 2. outsize political power, 3. veneration of white culture and values, 4. media triggering of whites. Then they identify a “Fourfold Threat” from viewpoints common to rural whites: 1. Racism, xenophobia, anti-urban disdain, and anti-immigrant sentiment, 2.  Acceptance of conspiracies as facts, 3. Undemocratic and anti-democratic beliefs, 4. Justification of violence.

Chapter 2 narrates the mostly economic problems generating white despair that include the loss of population, jobs, and the closing of basic services and essential health care.  In chapter 3 the authors describe how and why rural America has political power much greater than its numbers should allow. Discussion of the gerrymandered House and malapportioned Senate provide much of the answer.  

The next two chapters describe the ways and means Fox News and their political commentators work to generate resentment and hatred in the urban-rural divide, then on to Donald Trump as the unlikely leader of rural America. Chapter 6 returns to a more detailed discussions of the “Fourfold Threat” where the justification of violence holds most of the threat. Chapter 7 describes the rural population, currently at 76 percent white, but the 24 percent minority share is up in recent years, especially the Latino community. Discussion here describes the unique hardships of rural minorities as they provide cheap labor to a still depressed economy. The last chapter combines the cumulative evidence with an incredulous discussion of a divided America. Having assembled a well-documented book full of evidence of America’s social and political decline the authors might be wondering how America could fall so far.

I found a broad theme of Republican Party division mentioned at various places through the book. For example, at page 147 I found Trump “exposed a profound division between the Republican Party and the base of voters upon whom it relied, making clear that the base and the elite are different people with different priorities.” The Republican elite has worked relentlessly to convince white rural America they are an aggrieved minority justified in hating urban Democrats.

Republicans have succeeded in getting the white rural vote by wide margins while they ignore the rural population and do absolutely nothing for them. Schaller and Wardman document Republican party efforts to make rural life worse over time that include promoting private school vouchers, defunding public schools and public colleges.  They have successfully run off OB-GYN physicians as part of attacks on abortion rights and birth control. State governments create the local governments with enabling legislation, but state legislatures have the sovereign power to eliminate local government authority at any time. They can cancel elections and appoint their Republican operatives or deny local governments from providing services such as broadband service, preserving it for corporate monopolists.

The white rural population consistently votes against their own economic interest but no one should think they do not understand what they are doing. The authors apparently agree as I quote them: “With wide eyes and full hearts, rural Whites recognized Trump’s exclusionary, reality defying, undemocratic and violent tendencies- and rallied behind him because of, not despite, his repeated disregard for America’s most sacred democratic traditions.”

Remember that 18- and 19-year-old white boys of the south fought the Civil War and died by the tens of thousands to preserve slavery for rich plantation owners. In exchange the survivors got to claim to be in a class superior to the black freedmen. Before the Civil War southern white boys did not lynch blacks, they were a plantation investment. After the war Jim Crow and lynching made life quite dangerous for blacks, all to maintain class relations with the acceptance of the white elite that controlled the south. Never underestimate the power of class as a source for violence and political breakdown.

The rise of Trump has brought the country some unlikely sycophant followers. Senators Elise Stefanik and Ted Cruz, to wit, both graduates of Harvard College; maybe Harvard breeds more arrogance and egotism than knowledge and principle. Schaller and Wardman discussed politics with politicians that do not worry Trump misconduct will ever affect them. They express privilege as their just due with or without democracy. They pander to Trump violence toward objectors with no sign of reservation.

The authors of White Rural Rage did an impressive job organizing and documenting their varied assertions.  There was a variety of economic data, polling and voting data, stories of Trump followers planning violence such as the plan to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Witmer. They also consulted a variety of non-profit funded research from places like the Brookings Institution and others. I for one would not challenge any conclusions they made, but I will suggest a return to America’s recurring racism takes first place as the cause of this new round of America’s disintegrating politics. Trump merely threw out all restraint with a more aggressive brand of vulgarity and overt threat of violence than George Wallace from the 1970’s or any previous presidential candidate.

Trump has repeatedly vowed to end constitutional government which makes it impossible to believe he can take the presidential oath of office to protect and defend the constitution. He is not a legitimate candidate, but corporate America with their campaign money bags sits mum on the side lines, apparently in the belief Trump will not interfere with them or hurt their profits. The authors make an excellent case of the threat to democracy, but the threat of violence and civil warfare permeates the discussion. Readers can decide for themselves what they think are chances for widespread violence of Trump as president.

On the shortage of Labor, Especially Children

On April 1, 2024 Washington Post reporter Lauren Gurley wrote yet another story of politicians promoting child labor: “America is divided over major efforts to rewrite child labor laws.” The Post has previously published stories on child labor such as February 11, March 8, April 23, and April 30, 2023.

Corporate America’s relentless effort to exploit children goes back many decades. Congress passed the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act back in 1916, an age when the courts would not do anything to impede corporate America in their eternal quest for cheap labor. Child welfare reformers tried to use the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution to prohibit the transportation of products through interstate commerce for products produced with child labor.

Use of the commerce clause was a legal strategy intended to satisfy the judicial review they were certain would come. In previous cases the Supreme Court repeatedly ruled that the commerce clause of the constitution provided Congress with the necessary power to regulate interstate commerce. Even though the court previously upheld a ban on the interstate transportation of adulterated drugs, and another banning the interstate sale of lottery tickets, and still another banning the interstate transportation of women for immoral purposes, the justices searched for previously unheard of excuses to undo child labor legislation.

In the Supreme Court case known as Hammer v. Dagenhart the court wrote that the interstate transportation of adulterated drugs, lottery tickets, and prostitutes created “harmful results” but the new law that restricted children under 14 from working more than 8 hours a day, or more than 6 days a week, or before 6 a.m. or after 7 p.m. in textile mills did not create “harmful results” and was therefore beyond the power of Congress to regulate. In the wrap up to their long and convoluted written opinion of June 3, 1918 the justices declared the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act “repugnant” to the constitution.

The Post’s April 1 review reported a long list of child labor law violations with under age teens working long hours doing hazardous work that state and federal labor law prohibits for minors. Not to worry, just change the law as did Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds. She signed a new law that allows minors in that state to work in industrial laundries, light manufacturing, demolition, roofing and excavation. Ms. Gurley also mentions the Florida-based lobbying group, the Foundation for Government Accountability, that fights to restrict access to anti-poverty programs as well as drafting legislation to end child labor protections. This groups fits perfectly into Florida where Governor DeSantis signed a new law that allows 16 and 17 year olds to work seven days in a row and removes all hours restrictions for teens in online school or home school, effectively permitting them to work overnight shifts.

Current Population Survey data proves a plentiful supply of labor. The Bureau of the Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics report the civilian population since 1990 was up every year with an annual growth rate of 1.05 percent. A growing population allows an increase in the supply of labor, but the actual increase depends on the numbers who enter the labor force. In 2023, an adult civilian population of 266.9 million people supplied 167.1 million adults to the labor force, leaving 99.8 million adults not in the labor force (NLF); adults not children. Those not in the labor force can change their mind and enter the labor force to look for work and become part of the labor supply.

In the ten years from 2013 leading through 2023 the adult civilian population increased at .83 percent a year while the labor force increased at a rate of only .73 percent. In the same period the labor force increased at .73 percent the adults not in the labor increased at 1.01 percent.

In a labor shortage we would expect the opposite. In a shortage, the labor force grows faster than population as employers lure some of those 99.8 million adults back into the labor force by offering higher wages and maybe a few benefits as well. We can all conclude that wages and working conditions are substandard and do not generate enough people able or willing to return to the labor force. The United States does not have a shortage of labor; shortages are a myth offered by the cheapskates of corporate America, always trolling for people they can coerce to work for lower wages, including undocumented immigrants and underage children.

Freedom's Dominion - A Review

 Jefferson Cowie, Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power, (NY: Basic Books, 2022), 416 pages

Freedom means different things to different people, a matter Professor Cowie explores in his latest work of history. Our Constitution defines a government that wants us to obey the rules and accept the restrictions on freedom that democracy creates, but it does not define freedom. Freedom’s Dominion explores how some Americans have exploited the term freedom to justify their social and political views. 

Cowie’s introductory discussion applies freedom as it continues to be used and distorted in the American south to justify their racial views and their efforts to maintain an authoritarian social hierarchy. The introduction establishes the theme for the four episodes of southern history with the emphasis on how they played out in the town of Eufaula, Alabama. The first period follows five years after 1832 when the federal government signed the Treaty of Cusseta with the Creek Indians. The second period covers the years of reconstruction after the civil war while the third period covers the south after reconstruction ends, and the federal government withdrawals from the south. This third section continues into the 1950’s, but ends with the rise and career of George Wallace and the civil rights protests, the subject of section four.

Down in Alabama in 1832 southern whites would not accept the terms of the Treaty of Cusseta, which awarded the Creek Indians land in Alabama for a reservation. Southern whites invaded the reservation lands and settled them as their own. When the Federal Government attempted to fulfill their obligations and protect Indian land, southern whites decided an oppressive federal government denied them their freedom as they defined it.

In all four episodes southern whites declare states rights as justification for doing as they please and overrule federal government attempts to apply equal treatment before the law written into the U.S. Constitution. The white south came close to exterminating the Creek Indians, which the federal government resisted, but without matching southern violence with enough might to prevail. Instead, the remnants of the Creek nation were forcibly removed to Oklahoma territory.

The second episode covers reconstruction and the efforts of the federal government to protect the freed slaves from the determination of the white south to deny their rights and keep them as subordinate cheap labor. Again, the south claims freedom allows them to do as they please while the federal government has to resort to military occupation and be constantly ready to match southern violence in the name of constitutional government.  This second episode wears down the resistance of the north and sets the stage for the third episode and the failure of the federal government to protect the black community from 1877 until 1961. Chapters in this third section narrate the history of schemes to coerce and terrorize blacks into submission.

The schemes include arresting blacks on false claims to exploit them as prison labor. How to rig elections and destroy democracy is another chapter, followed by lynching blacks in the next chapter.  

On lynching, Cowie writes “Largely unexplored in the varying explanations of American lynching is something fundamental: the continuity of the underlying idea of freedom. Reframing the most heinous aspects of American violence as part of the most cherished set of principles in American life is neither obvious nor easy to accept.” Impossible to accept for most of us, but he reviews others who have puzzled over it and written books about it. In one, the author suggests lynching “arose precisely out of an ideology of the sense of what rights accrued to someone possessing democratic freedom.” Cowie reviews others writing on lynching: Ida B. Wells, Jacquelyn, Dowd Hall, and describes the tepid efforts of Presidents that worried too much about votes to take a principled stand.

Part III continues into the great depression and the New Deal that finds southern whites working in the textile mills for a pittance while blacks remain impoverished as tenant farmers. White supremacy reigns but only the white elite have political and economic power, which they use to assure political dominance and cheap labor. WWII finds racial discrimination in war productions jobs and a weak response by the Roosevelt administration to bring equal rights for blacks.

The book’s fourth part covers the rise of George Wallace as a resident of Eufaula, a state legislator, state judge, governor of Alabama and presidential candidate. Readers get a sense for Wallace from some of his aphorisms: “Moderation [is] political suicide,” [Voters]’d rather be against something than for something.” And “[A] certain amount of pain must be expected and tolerated; opponents must be dispatched without mercy; and fighters must be prepared to do whatever is necessary to win.”

Winning for Wallace meant appealing to the racial bigotry of southern whites, slightly disguised as freedom from “oppressive” federal government efforts to guarantee the civil and political rights in the U.S. Constitution. Cowie tracts the political career of George Wallace narrating his opposition to voting rights, civil rights, racial equality, integrated schools, and his campaigns platforms for the 1968 and 1972 presidential elections.

A twelve-page conclusion ends the book, where the last paragraph calls for a commitment for the federal government to defend civil and political rights at the local, state and federal levels. Good history has a theme to go with the narrative and Cowie does this extremely well in Freedom’s Dominion. He comes back to freedom as practiced in the south from 1832 to the present. Since neither blacks nor anyone else give up civil rights through deception, southern politics requires violence, or the threat of violence, for whites to sustain their prerogatives. All four eras define freedom that includes white violence used in defiance of a consistently timid federal government.

The book is well organized, reads easily and provides useable documentation to pursue selected topics. It connects directly to current Republicans that define freedom and patriotism as it suits their authoritarian aims. Those who believe in equality and freedom may react with incredulous disbelief at the southern notions of freedom, but unfortunately it qualifies as current events.

 

The Debt Ceiling Hoax

 

The Debt Ceiling Hoax

The Federal government has the sovereign power for the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve Bank to control the money supply and so it can always pay its bills without borrowing from the public. Federal debt has no characteristics of what people think of as debt. For starters it will never be paid off and it would be extremely destructive to do so. The amount of this so-called debt is irrelevant except for managing the economy. It is the duty of the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve Bank to have the right amount of money in the economy to generate the production and income that maintains full employment. Increasing the money supply to pay a federal budget deficit can generate inflation and so the government will borrow from the public to reduce their spending power to control spending and prevent inflation. The accumulated debt is nothing but the legacy of the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve attempting to manage the economy. Since the federal government has the sovereign power to create money, a debt ceiling is a complete hoax. Total up the billions and billions of federal debt generated during the Bush and Trump administrations and you will understand their politics.

Wilmington's Lie - A Review

 

David Zucchino, Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy, (NY: Grove Atlantic Press, 2020)

In Wilmington’s Lie readers get a historical account of race relations and the overthrow of Democracy by white supremacists in 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina. Zucchino has a brief prologue introducing the violent day of November 10, 1898 and a brief epilogue at the end of a 352 page narrative divided into three chronological parts. Part I has 62 pages in eight chapters that narrate Wilmington from the end of the Civil War to March 1898. Part II has 120 pages and 17 chapters that narrates the period from March 1898, until election day November 8, 1898. Part III has 163 pages in 12 chapters that returns to the post-election day of November 10, 1898, and onward into a narrative account of the violent aftermath of election day and the end of voting for black people in the south.

Part I gives a view of Wilmington life when former slaves had jobs and some freedom, liberty and civil rights as a legacy of reconstruction. Readers meet some of the white and black people that will be part of the narrative in Part II and III. These are especially Alfred Moore Waddell, known as Colonel Waddell, a white supremacist, Josephus Daniels, a white supremacist newspaper owner-publisher and later a cabinet member for President Woodrow Wilson, and Alexander Lightfoot Manly, a black journalist.

Part II moves along covering key events in the campaign to overthrow democracy and end black voting in Wilmington. Readers learn the depression of 1893 left rural whites so impoverished they voted with the freed slaves and progressive whites to elect Republican candidates and defeat the white Supremacist democratic party in some local and state offices like Wilmington. Blacks outnumber whites in Wilmington: 11,324 black, 8,731 white.

To the white supremacist’s black participation was “negro domination” that could not be tolerated. These Part II chapters gives dates and details of events in the campaign to suppress black voting in the months leading up to the November 8, 1898 election. It gives details of organizing white racist men into a para-military force of Red Shirts.

On August 18, 1898 multiple North Carolina newspapers published remarks of Rebecca Latimer Felton who demanded “The black fiend who lays unholy and lustful hands on a white woman in the state of Georgia shall surely die!” She wanted black man seen with a white women to be lynched. Alexander Manly published a reply to Felton in his newspaper the Daily Record. His reply included “Tell your men that it is no worse for a black man to be intimate with a white woman, than for a white man to be intimate with a colored woman.” Manly’s reply turned into an excuse to rally white supremacists.

On October 24, 1898 Colonel Waddell spoke at Thalian Hall in Wilmington, N.C. where he claimed whites endured “intolerable conditions” imposed on whites by the “ragged rabble of negroes.” . . .  “We are resolved to change them, if we have to choke the current of the Cape Fear with carcasses.” These two episodes illustrate a small part of the campaign of various white men and their varied plots to promote fear through speeches and newspaper stories that included false claims that blacks were planning a violent uprising with intention to kill whites.

Zucchino includes efforts by blacks and some white Republicans to contact President McKinley and North Carolina governor Daniel Russell to intervene, but to no avail. The white supremacy campaign succeeded. Few blacks were able to vote and the white supremacist Democrats were swept into office.

Part II ends with the November 8 election and Part III narrates the violent aftermath. Prevailing in the elections did not remove all blacks from elected office or appointed jobs, or put them in their place. Stealing the election without outside opposition only emboldened the white supremacists to further violence against blacks. Beginning November 10, a white mob of Red Shirts encouraged by Colonel Waddell burned the Manly newspaper offices. From that Red Shirts invaded black neighborhoods shooting and killing black men hopelessly outgunned. Zucchino takes three chapters and 39 pages narrating the day’s violence and slaughter of blacks.

After the killing stopped armed white supremacist groups patrolled the streets while people like Colonel Waddell removed the elected government, some white and some black, and targeted other blacks and whites to banish from Wilmington under threat of death. The Red Shirts roamed about and much of the terrified black community fled to the surrounding forests and swamps. Zucchino narrates the stories of these events and the narrow escape of Manly and others.

The white ministers and others celebrated the return of white supremacist rule. Five days after the killings Josephus Daniels staged a celebration attended by thousands he titled a “Victory, White Supremacy and Good Government Jubilee” at Raleigh. Visitors arrived on reduced fare trains greeted with flaming tar barrels and bonfires. Fireworks lit up darkening skies on a crisp autumn evening. “Every man had a torchlight which gleamed and blinked like the eye of some mighty cyclops,” Daniels newspaper reported.

Zucchino goes on to explain the timid and failed effort of President McKinley and his administration and Governor Daniel Russell to make any response to the killings and end of Democracy and to explain the long term method to end black voting for seventy years. The U.S. Constitution demands the federal government guarantee a Republican form of government in the states. Instead it would be Jim Crow, the poll tax and the literacy test where the white supremacists devised a crude method to have illiterate whites vote by allowing a literacy test exception for those who had parents or grandparents that voted before 1867.

Zucchino writes a thirty-three page epilogue that allows comparing the present attitudes and voter ID laws in the context of the past, and recounts events from a hundred anniversary observance in 1998. In 2000 the North Carolina legislature sponsored a state commission to investigate the cause and effect of the 1898 coup that is available on the Internet. The report concluded the coup was a documented conspiracy. There was also student protest in 2015 at the University of North Carolina objecting to buildings named after white supremacists. All of the principal figures are dead by 2020 but Zucchino ended the book reviewing some post-coup d'état history and interviewing some remaining family members, especially of Josephus Daniels and Alex Manly, in an apparent search for regret, but regret implies change of heart which never comes easily.

The Book Wilmington’s Lie starts with a good title. It happens often that people of influence with the opportunity to do the right thing, who then choose the wrong thing, want to cover it up with excuses and delete it from history as happened with Wilmington. It took a hundred years before an accounting and Wilmington’s Lie should be considered a thorough and orderly accounting of it, although not the only one, it is the latest one.

The book reads easily in well organized short chapters that maintain a readable narrative style. The writing avoids academic excess. Chapter titles often identify an event or subject in the chapter to come. Zucchino avoids moralizing and leaves the reader to judge the evidence, which he documents carefully. The book includes a lengthy bibliography.

As the story moves along I would say the narrative has embedded in it the chronology of steps needed for a coup d'état. A coup d'état requires one or a few completely unscrupulous authoritarian leaders-demagogues to unify a group by embellishing their grievances, perverting the facts, and encouraging their hatred toward a definable target. Targets are usually racial minorities although it could be elite’s, religious groups, immigrants and others. Democracy needs persuasion and a majority, but a coup d’etat needs the unifying power of hatred and it needs violence and assassination to generate fear in the majority. A coup d’etat brings minority rule where fear subdues the majority into passive acceptance. Just talking and speeches do not succeed in that the victims can not be easily deceived with the lies and misconduct going on around them. Patience will be necessary because it takes time to convince authoritarian followers they can murder their hated targets without consequence, and for the majority to convince themselves to do nothing about it. It is worth noting that Wilmington and the atrocities there preceded Adolf Hitler and deserve comparison to Trump. The book received recognition with a Pulitzer Prize, which it deserved, but even so it is a sobering account for a country claiming to be a democracy.

Kill Switch - A Review

 

Adam Jentleson, Kill Switch: the Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy, (NY: Liveright Publishing Corp, 2021) 254 pages

In his new book, Kill Switch, Adam Jentleson writes a history of the filibuster as it evolved and continues to evolve for use by a Senate minority to stall and defeat a majority. Jentleson worked as a staff member for Senator Harry Reid from 2010 until Reid retired in 2017. The book has nine chapters between an introduction and conclusion. Part I, the Rise of the Filibuster, has four chapters with the history of filibustering from its early 19^th century use until 1964. Part II, Tyranny of the Minority, has five chapters explaining the use and abuse of the filibuster between 1964 and the present.

The rules that govern Senate operation have varied over the years, but Jentleson documents the filibuster rules and how their use has damaged democracy and majority rule from one era to another.  The Part I chapters begin with a selection of quotations from the Federalist Papers to develop the arguments of James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and others from the 1787 Philadelphia convention. Their arguments supported majority rule by elected representatives; there was no filibuster in 1787. Readers learn how a “previous question” rule in the initial Senate rules worked to end debate and proceed to a vote.

Next we meet Senator John C. Calhoun and his idea that Senators are entitled to hold the floor for unlimited debate. Jentleson devotes more than twenty pages for discussing the 19^th century Senate contest over majority rule between Senator Calhoun and his allies and Senator Daniel Webster, Henry Clay and their more numerous allies. Their inconclusive contest continued into the 20^th Century when readers meet Rule 22 and its 1913 origins in the Wilson administration.

Rule 22 allows senators to call for a vote to end a filibuster; a vote they defined as “Cloture.” While the previous question rule wrapped up debate Rule 22 required a vote by a 2/3’s super majority to end debate. The committee that devised the rule called it a tool to “terminate successful filibustering” except that it turned into a powerful method for the south to block legislation intended to provide constitutional rights to the black community. Here Jentleson develops 1922, 1937, and 1940 efforts to pass an anti-lynching bill and 1942, 1944, and 1946 efforts to end the poll tax. All were defeated by southern filibusters.

We meet Senator Richard Russell of Georgia in these contests and his determination to use the filibuster to get his minority way over civil rights. Jentleson reviews the history of failed attempts by Senator Paul Douglas, Hubert Humphrey and others to get rid of Rule 22. Discussion shifts to Senator Lyndon Johnson of Texas and his successful efforts to cozy up to Russell. Johnson realizes he cannot be elected president as a southern racist and Jentleson takes his readers through the Johnson transformation to civil rights advocate. The Master of the Senate ended a southern filibuster for the first time ever and steered the 1964 Civil Rights Bill in law.

The Part II chapters explain what happens “when the filibuster was streamlined so that it could be used against any issue, by leaders wielding unprecedented top-down control.” After describing Senator Harry Reid’s successful 2013 scheme to end the filibuster for presidential nominations, which the press dubbed “going nuclear,” Jentleson identifies those in the super-minority that obstruct the Senate. They are WWAC – White, Wealthy, Anti-Choice, and Conservative. Discussion includes their connection to racial prejudice.

We meet the Tea Party of 2009 and some examples of their obstructionist tactics, which Jentleson argues resulted from using the polarizing innovations of Jesse Helms. Readers learn of Helms direct mail fundraising, filibustering methods and polarizing views. Discussion includes his help electing Ronald Reagan and his choice to attack abortion as a source of political power.

In Chapter 7, the Means of Control, Jentleson returns to Senate history with a brief narrative of Senate leadership through the years until getting to Lyndon Johnson’s innovations of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Johnson turned the Senate majority leader into a position with legislative power by doling out committee assignments, but there would be more changes after 1980.

Between 1980 and 2018 the Senate changed parties nine times, giving Republicans a chance to apply the Johnson methods for their own purposes. However, the “insecure majorities” turned the Senate into a continuous campaign of political attacks and aggressive fund raising. Harry Reid took over as Senate majority leader for the 110^th Congress in 2007 and Jentleson narratives his strategies and methods in the Senate, described as the greatest consolidation of congressional power since Newt Gingrich ruled the House.”

Readers meet Mitch McConnell during this discussion - lawyer, former state judge, and Senator from Kentucky since 1985 – and learn of his flip-flopping views for and against campaign finance and the filibuster. After using the filibuster against Senator McCain’s campaign reform and losing he decided to support an end to the filibuster to prevent Democrats from blocking Republican judicial appointments. The Democrats, always playing defense, would not go along. Jentleson documents all the judges the Democrats opposed were confirmed anyway.

Harry Reid continued as Senate majority leader through the 113^th Congress of 2015-2017. Jentleson narrates these years where Harry Reid struggles to get President Obama’s agenda and nominations through the Senate. These were the years of unprecedented Republican obstruction. The narrative has the details of the Harry Reid versus Mitch McConnell battle over health care, nominations including the Merrick Garland nomination and others.

These later chapters explain the new filibuster and how it empowered people like McConnell to block everything, anytime. After 1964 the filibuster lost its southern, civil rights identity after rules changes allowed the Senate to move to other business without ending a filibuster. More changes allow the Senate majority leader to set the floor schedule for the Senate by unanimous consent. The filibuster lost its name entirely as a single objector could have a bill taken off the schedule by placing “a Hold.” An email “hotline” allows any Senator to place a hold as an unaccountable and unpublicized secret.

In addition to the filibuster Jentleson fills in the obstructionist details of the Obama years. The details include McConnell’s efforts to unite the Republican establishment with the Tea Party extremists and his efforts to pacify Trump with everyone. McConnell succeeded by comes off as a competitor without a conscience. In conclusion there are a few suggestions to save the Senate. Getting rid of the filibuster heads the list, which could be done easily. He sees the filibusters as the prime cause of minority rule, although not the only one. The majority leader’s absolute power over the Senate schedule is another.

The book does a good job documenting the history and destructive effect of the filibuster. It reads easily and sources are cited in notes, allowing further reading. The political history of the Congress over the last thirty years proves the Democrats have failed miserably while defending the filibuster, a conclusion I had before reading this book. I benefited from previously reading Martin B Gold & Dimple Gupta’s 2005 piece cited in discussion: “The Constitutional Option to Change Senate Rules and Procedures: A Majoritarian Means to Overcome the Filibuster”. Even so there was lots of filibuster material new to me and I especially like having my conclusions confirmed with the documented account and evidence here.

The filibuster can only be defensive but a poor defense at that, even accepting defense as a good strategy, which I do not believe it is in 2022 if ever. The Democrats need to be deciding and defending what they think is right. While Jentleson worked for Senator Reid and clearly admires him, Reid’s nuclear option feels defensive and timid. Democrats need to move over to offense. Kill Switch will help convince you of that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Labor History and the Supreme Court Abortion Ruling

 

Labor History and the Supreme Court Abortion Ruling

I would like to suggest a connection between labor history and the recent Supreme Court decision concerning abortion rights; this being a labor blog. Labor history has a long record of vigilante violence and authoritarian misconduct going back into the 19^th century. Throughout labor history mob violence directed at strikers and picketers seldom occurred as spontaneous response to the events of a strike. Corporate interests with the economic power to assert authority took repeated steps to organize and arm vigilante forces to break strikes, and their recruits recognized their recruiters had the political power to protect them from criminal prosecution. Corporate officials acted with confidence and impunity to assert the authoritarian power of a police state while avoiding any compromise that democracy might generate.

For at least fifty years abortion opponents have demanded, without a hint of compromise, that a fertilized egg at the time of conception will be the same thing as an eight or nine month fetus about to be born. Such a view can only prevail in a police state or a country like the United States with a paralyzed Senate, a “we do as we please” majority on a Supreme Court and a Republican Party determined to corrupt free elections.

It was true in 1973 as it is true in 2022 that the Constitution has nothing to say about abortion, but the Senate and the Congress, then as now, can be blocked and paralyzed by minority rule. The few who have bothered to read the Roe v. Wade opinion know that Justice Blackmun wrote a long historical discussion of the pros and cons of abortion before coming to a compromise ruling in between the extremes of fanatics. Justice Blackmun did what democracy should be able to do, and the Senate and the American Constitution cannot do: compromise. The U.S. Constitution is obsolete and desperately needs to be amended or replaced. The current episode should make clear it has defects capable of bringing down constitutional government, not just majority rule.

On January 6, 2021, Trump supplied the authority for his base to attack the capital and extensive video footage establishes they acted with confidence and impunity as a violent band of hooligans expecting to be protected by Trump as part of their devotion to his authoritarian ways. The Supreme Court intends and expects their rulings on guns and military assault weapons, such as the recent move against gun safety in New York, will be used by armed vigilantes as an aid to enforce their decision on abortion, and other decisions to come, the same as labor history records.

The Supreme Court majority in the 1857 Dred Scott decision expected to resolve the polarized politics of slavery, but all they did was debase themselves, the Court and push the country to a violent civil war. Now, another Court majority expects to end the abortion fight with an authoritarian political ruling. There is a difference though. Then Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney discussed their upcoming ruling with President James Buchanan. They were both foolish enough to believe the Supreme Court had the prestige to resolve what political compromise could not do.  

Not now. Now they have eliminated the Roe v. Wage compromise of 1973 and made the political decision to encourage and promote civil warfare as leverage to get their way. In 2022, these police state justices know exactly what they’re doing, they just don’t care.