The story tries to make sense of the fact that Trump has repeatedly remarked in an ominous way that he's not too concerned about whether people vote, as if the plan is to win the election not on votes but court challenges.
“I think we are going to see mass refusals to certify the election” in November, says Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias. “Everything we are seeing about this election is that the other side is more organized, more ruthless, and more prepared.”
I don't even know why anyone at MSNBC is surprised. I've been worried for now a couple of years that this was going to happen and it was because of reporting MSNBC and others did even back then, saying that the groundwork for this was being laid. That we have taken this long to recognize the threat is distressing.
If Biden does not have a task force in place to counter this threat, he needs to make one.
As I noted in my July 5 blog post Supreme Challenge, before Biden passed the baton to Harris, Biden now has considerable power he's opting not to use but must reconsider using to assure fair elections.
He could, for example, order DOJ to charge every one of these people who are conspiring in advance and without foundation to challenge an election with seditious conspiracy. Such powers, SCOTUS tells us, are absolute and not subject to legal review. Probably there are other actions he could take, too.
My more general point is that we don't have to sit idle and watch misdeeds play out as if there is nothing to be done. Certainly if Trump is elected, HE will use those same powers in exactly the same way but without foundation, hesitation, or remorse, and without the health of our democracy as his goal.
As noted by Marc Elias in the quote above, these guys are not kidding around, they are playing for keeps. The Dems better treat this as the serious threat it is. I'd say the GOP should likewise care, but they're in a hypnotic trance, operating in mindless lockstep, so it's up to those not under the spell to act.
Maybe, too, Kamala can see what Joe might not and use her newfound clout to get him to take the gloves off.
Author's Notes:
If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.
This is effectively a mirror of
an essay I wrote on Mastodon earlier today, July 30, 2024.
This post is effectively a mirror for easier access, though the original venue
has some comments not replicated here, and obviously I've done some reformatting and light editing to accommodate better typography options available here.
I have some thoughts on the sudden shift Sunday from a Biden/Harris ticket
to a Harris ticket. I'm just going to bundle them all together here.
An Unusual Transition
I think it's going to be difficult for Kamala to develop a different position
from Biden on issues where she disagrees. Her position as VP has required
that she echo Joe's position, not make her own policy, but as the Democrats'
primary candidate, she must feel free to differ.
It's important that Joe give her express permission to disagree publicly
on matters. He can still be the decider for the present administration,
but they need to understand that she might differ, so they must be explicit
about this.
In some cases, he may want to shift positions. In others, they
might need a transition plan. In others still, they should give people a
heads up that there will be a difference. This is how democracies work.
It's odd, but we should be proud, not embarrassed or ashamed, that there is
some complexity to it. That we can do it in a civil way is exactly the kind
of thing we want to preserve, and to keep the Republicans from destroying.
Residual Biden Baggage
Biden was not just laggging in the polls because he was old. He had taken other
actions that alienated voters that Kamala can get back if she is careful.
One example is the Gaza genocide. Many felt Biden was complicit in this by
continuing to send weapons and not pushing harder on Israel to stop.
Frequent references were made by Netanyahu to the idea that it must defend
itself, but no rational person thinks you have to kill an entire society,
every last man, woman, and child in order to defend yourself.
Many have defensibly called this a genocide, even though a formal ruling
on the matter will take longer than most of these people have to live.
In February, however,
the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that
Israel must
take steps to prevent any acts of genocide in Gaza, and many took this as
a clear hint that what they were doing was in range to be considered a
genocide.
It is important that Kamala not follow in Biden's footsteps
in appearing to be complicit in this, and in fact work with President Biden
to make sure the US has taken a hard stance on that even now.
Not only is this important for a purely humanitarian reasons,
but she's running on law & order, and it's a bad look to be aiding and abetting
someone who may later be charged with war crimes.
Moreover, within the US, there have been peaceful protests of the treatment of people
in Gaza that have been summarily labeled as antisemitic. Police forces have
had a far too strong hand. There is a Constitutional right to peaceful assembly that
some say has been intentionally violated. There is a block of voters who are outraged
and have been blaming Biden for that. This is a chance for a reset.
Democracy Now produced an excellent
video on this matter,
interviewing Annelise Orleck, former chair of the women's and gender studies department and
the Jewish studies department at Dartmouth College, who suffered a violent arrest and
said in the interview "People have to be able to talk about Palestine without being attacked by police."
Kamala needs to adopt a more discussion-friendly position,
again because this kind of hard line approach
is more appropriate to the GOP.
Certainly I have had discussions with people about why it's important to vote Democrat
in this election, to avoid a monster getting into office. Rightly or wrongly, there are
voters who in good faith have concluded that the policies so far under Biden are those
of a monster as well. Trying to discuss degrees of monsterness is not likely to be Kamala's
path to success in such discussions.
Democrats need to stand for the idea that political problems are resolved by discussion,
which may sometimes involve peaceful protest as protected by the Constitution.
To navigate this, I think Kamala establish some clear guidelines to clarify Democratic
policy on this. I suggest at least these rules of thumb, which seem to me to be fair
to both sides in this debate:
Israel has a right to defend itself.
Genocidegoes well beyond mere “defense” of Israel.
One can challenge Israeli policy without being antisemitic.
(A US State Department web page explicitly clarifies
“criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic”)
Engaging Palestinians in a civil way does not imply one is pro-Hamas or antisemitic.
Peaceful protest is Constitutionally protected.
Picking a Vice President
Not because he is Jewish, but specifically because (as discussed above), he's taken hard line stances against protesters,
Shapiro would not be a good choice of of Vice President. Picking him would not be healing. It would open questions of Constitutional violations
and police brutality that would distract from a clean campaign.
I have been swayed by the large amount of support I've seen from others, and the observations that he's an excellent
speaker and debater, that Pete Buttigieg is the right choice for Kamala's VP.
I'm not 100% sure that Pete is being considered, though I definitely feel he should be.
Among those that the media seems to think are being considered,
I see Mark Kelly as my second choice.
Mark doesn't seem like a bad guy, but he's not as dynamic and engaging as Pete,
who I really think could bring a lot more real energy to the campaign.
Skeletons in Kamala's closet?
At this point I really don't care if there are skeletons in Kamala's closet.
She checks enough boxes right now that I'm ready to back her in spite of bumpiness
that might come up.
I've seen various claims in news articles and on social media that Kamala's past record will soon be seen by the public as its own kind of baggage,
that the Democrats are in a euphoria, not paying attention to her past record, and about to be surprised.
I'm not especially worried about most of that, even where I might disagree.
Of course, I reserve the right to complain and to suggest she modify policies I don't like.
But that's consistent with my real concern, which is that she stand for civility and especially
peaceful resolution of disputes through civil discussion, and for the Constitution as we have
traditionally known it before the GOP recently started to challenge and dismantle it.
Democracy is under attack. Honestly, if Liz Cheney had registered Democrat and was Biden's VP
with the necessary popular support, I'd probably vote for her. Not because I want her policies. I disagree with most
of what I've seen of her taste in social policy. But because right now
at this point in history, our biggest concern is to stabilize our democracy, and I know she would
reliably do that.
Fortunately, I know that Kamala will keep the Constitution safe and will have better policies—even if
I might still disagree with a few.
Once we're safe from Project 2025, and better safeguards are put in place,
we can get back to ordinary partisan bickering.
My biggest concern is Climate Change, but even that has no chance without a functioning democracy.
So we have to fix democracy first.
Science cannot function without an open exchange of ideas,
free of censorship or the injection of propaganda.
Project 2025 is putting the unfettered exchange of ideas in severe jeopardy, so we have to definitively stop that.
I do hope we hurry, though, because the Climate Change is not waiting.
Author's Notes:
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Author's Note: Recently, on Mastodon, Jason Self
posted a nice little blurb
in celebration of the 57th anniversary of the
Incompatible Time Sharing (ITS)
operating system (OS),
enumerating some of its cool features.
His list was good, but there's a feature of ITS that I've always felt isn't
given its due, so I responded at length with my thoughts about that.
Lars Brinkhoff
suggested that I should put those thoughts in a more easily-referenced place,
so that's what I'm doing here.
I've done some light editing to make this read better of context.
No attempt was made to make this a precise mirror. Let's call the original a rough draft and this cleaned
up version the official version.
Oh, and in my personal experience,
this operating system is pronounced as three separate letters (“I-T-S”),
not like the possessive pronoun (though see notes at end for some exceptions).
Glad we got that cleared up. Now let's dive in.
The big, underappreciated thing
about the ITS operating system, too easily seen as a weakness,
was the nearly complete lack of security. Seriously.
Today, of course, security is absolutely essential. But the luxury of working without it back then resulted in a huge productivity gain, enabling us to do early experimentation with
ideas that otherwise
were destined to seem impossible for another few decades.
What do I mean by a lack of security? Well,
ITS existed on the net (ARPANET, not yet Internet)
for years with
no file security,
no protection against any user (even a not-logged-in user)
shutting down timesharing,
tools that let any user spy on any other, and
commands to read interactive messages or email that took a command line argument of whose messages to read.
Yet the level of abuse of these gaping security holes was negligible/tolerable for a long time.
You heard me right. Years.
It was partly an artifact of the time. Maybe some combination of
most folks not thinking to make mischief in the first place,
most users knowing how precious it was and being asked to behave like adults and respect it,
using those same tools to see what others were doing and mutually policing,
using spy tools to make sure people weren't floundering and frustrated but helped to succeed,
treating even guests (tourists) with respect,
"security through obscurity" still worked back then.
I didn't understand how critical this was until I started using a
Digital Equpment Corporation (DEC)
commercial
TOPS-20 OS on basically the same
(PDP-10) hardware.
I felt suddenly way less productive and was at a loss for why.
I went back to an ITS host and enumerated all the programs in the system directories
(SYS, SYS1, SYS2, and SYS3) to see what was missing.
One realization was that most of that software just supported other ITS software.
It wasn't what was missing.
The other realization, something I then had no name for but with benefit of history I now do,
was that ITS was an early form of social media. I think that's a better, less nutty way to
make sense of its spying capabilities, such as the DDT (shell) command
called “os” (for “Output Spy”) to say whose console to spy on.
What passed for display back then was more primitive than you may be thinking. In most cases,
and I'm not going to go into exceptions here, it wasn't even
bitmapped, just
7-bit ASCII characters
assumed to be in a fixed font determined by the console display device.
If you saw that device, you might imagine it to be a personal computer, but it was just a display.
All computation was on a centralized mainframe operating system the size of a room,
and running the ITS operating system, a timesharing system that let multiple users be connected at once.
Note that this was not camera spying. There were no cameras on these machines.
No real provision for that kind of thing.
This was just
a view into the stream of character text and display codes that were rapidly
flying by on the way to the user's console.
The “modern” (or, perhaps better, “surviving”) analog would be the
ANSI escape codes you can use on things like
a Linux terminal window to get simple display effects without presuming much about the
specific font size or family.
Like in Star Trek TNG episode “I, Borg”,
TOPS-20 made me feel like Hugh did:
There were “no other voices in my mind”,
voices of other users that I might “hear” on ITS.
(Metaphorically “hear”. We had no audio back then.)
The difference between ITS and TOPS-20? I was lonely, just as Hugh was.
I could send messages on TOPS-20, but only private ones.
Socializing information, knowing what others were doing, sharing work?
All very hard on TOPS-20. The silence was deafening.
Similarly, you might ask:
Why would anyone be allowed to see somebody else's screen?
Why would that ever not be creepy?
Why would someone want you to read their messages to/from others?
Well, isn't that what we do on Facebook in the modern era?
Or on tools like Slack at work?
Somebody starts a conversation and others arrive to see it,
see what's been said so far,
and add to it.
That's how ITS felt. The metaphor used by these other systems is not “spying” but
in practice it's very similar.
You'd login, notice friends were online,
read their recent messages to find out what was going on,
and then (once caught up in conversations), join in.
Details were different, but in the social media paradigm it's easier to see
why it felt not so much creepy as fabulously useful,
especially compared to the isolation of other OSes of the time—and even some now, though that's
finally changing, catching up with ideas we explored decades ago.
In the context of the era, it made us enormously more efficient than you might have expected
by creating synergies not available on commercial systems that had to try to be secure.
And the ability to watch somebody else's screen? Well, we do that in zoom today by screen sharing,
though we now elect when we do it and when we can't. Still, it's powerful.
In fact, ITS had mechanisms to let someone else not only watch but intervene in and type to your console
as they watched. That was more powerful than you can do with simple screen sharing now, though more elaborate
tools do exist. It's all a matter of trust, and back then we afforded ourselves more trust than one might today
imagine.
Social trust, more often called “freedom” is a tricky thing.
It accepts a certain risk along with almost a prayer that people will use it wisely.
Once it's abused, it's quickly a tragedy of the commons.
Preserving such trust, such freedom, is more important than people realize.
It wasn't enforced by programs, but by social conventions, by who we revered and who we did not.
There is an analogy to be made to real world society and politics today, but for brevity
I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.
My point, though, is that people too easily imagine it was uniformly more primitive back then.
There were technical limitations, certainly. But it was different too. Not easy to compare.
No camera, just screen, and no ability to opt out of sharing it.
And it wasn't really the screen you were sharing, just the codes that had been sent to draw on it, obtained
starting from an arbitrary point in the output buffer (a sort of low-level, ephemeral event queue).
Often it looked crappy on a slow terminal trying to watch a fast one because of data loss trying
to keep up, or trying to watch a screen with sophisticated display capability from a screen
(or even “paper terminal”)
lacking such capability. And it could be hilarious or frustrating
if you spied on someone who was spying on you, with those characters just going back and forth
in an endless loop. Even so, most of the time, it worked pretty well.
You could usually tell what someone else was doing.
It was also an early interactive, collaborative development environment.
Programmers worked with each other and users (who they could watch using
those programs to learn directly how well they worked). We had no lack of ideas and a
very specific sense of what was working and what wasn't in the things we had.
A lot of today's “new inventions” may be things we knew we wanted.
We were limited by what tools were implemented, so progress started slow.
And processors were slower than today, so that didn't help.
But people were clever, and much more careful with time/space efficiency than today.
As just one example, I recall Emacs
starting in about 3 seconds on ITS, on a PDP-10
with 10-15 users. I'm sure it took longer with 20 or 30 users logged in at the same time.
Today, on much faster personal hardware, Emacs starts fast but still
not instantly. Of course, more happens now under the covers.
And more flexibility— and sloppiness—are allowed.
But Emacs (then implemented in
TECO, not yet
Emacs Lisp)
was a real wonder in both size and space efficiency.
Back then if something didn't work, you sent a bug report.
Bug reports were something everyone learned to write as part of their civic duty to make sure stuff got better
over time. Another social detail.
You could report a bug on anything by mailing to BUG-whatever.
Host names were optional, defaulting to the local host. It was a small community.
If there was no actual whatever corresponding to the bug address sent to,
the mail was delivered to BUG-RANDOM-PROGRAM to make sure nothing got lost.
Someone seeing the report, who might be a maintainer or even just someone
casually peeking in on that maintainer's mail,
might say “show me”. So you'd reproduce the bug on your console and assume they were able to watch
along as you did. Again like Zoom (the screen sharing part, not the video).
Most stuff lacked formal documentation.
If there was a "Help" option in most programs, it usually just told you that documentation would get there
eventually.
A major exception was Emacs, because TECO libraries forced you to document each function, and most people did.
But most other programs had no help at all.
I remember being surprised, years later on a commercial system, that someone was able to figure out a program.
“I looked at the documentation,” they said. “Oh, I replied, people are actually doing that
now?”
But lack of formal documentation did not mean ITS users went without help.
Many just typed queries to the DDT (shell) command line,
vaguely like you might do with
Copilot in a modern system.
The user would probably see a syntax error if they typed such a question that way, but often someone would be spying on them,
especially if the user was new, to make sure they were doing OK.
So they might volunteer an answer based on what they saw the user doing, syntax errors and all, maybe before the user asked.
☺
It was primitive tech, but we pushed it to its limit.
And the lack of security helped a lot by not wasting programmer time, program memory, and execution time
doing things we had no need of.
We built many sketches of our imagined futures.
ITS was all about that in a way other OSes of the time were not.
Author's Notes:
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I'm told by Lars Brinkhoff, subsequent to publishing this article, that
some people did pronounce “ITS” like the single syllable “its”!
He cites Barbara Liskov and
some “Zork people” as having confirmed this.
There were four ITS machines (AI, ML, MC, and DM). DM (“dynamic modeling”) was where Zork arose,
and always seemed to me a community slightly more insular from the other three. Perhaps this was a result
of that same cultural separation. I'm just speculating, though.
I have issues with all the discussion over Biden. People seem to be talking at crossed purposes.
I think some are not listening to what others are saying.
That's super disrespectful, but also hugely
unproductive because there's no point arguing against something no one is saying.
For example, some are seeing this as pro-Biden vs anti-Biden.
That's a huge misunderstanding.
The ones asking Biden to step aside are almost exclusively people who like and respect Biden.
They're NOT “against” him.
They're interested in seeing Dems win, and they don't think Biden can.
I'm going to refer instead to Stayers and Steppers.
Stayers are those who think Biden should stay,
and Steppers are those who think Biden should step aside.
I conjured these words so they don't have pre-attached senses of Good vs Bad.
They're just people divided by their preferred tactic for winning the election.
It comes up in Biden v. Trump discussions that folks say to vote Biden because he's not an autocrat.
I also hear some Stayers saying that Steppers should
stop talking about forcing a candidate on voters that they didn't vote for,
that that's autocratic.
It's not autocratic. The process is messy, but it's not autocratic.
Many of us have used terms like fascist and autocrat loosely for our whole lives
because we never needed the terms to refer to our reality.
We now risk seeing these played out in horrifying reality, so let's be more careful with words.
I do think who takes over and why is important, though.
Kamala's whole job is to be the backup for Biden.
So she's the obvious choice. I agree opening the convention to a fight among other candidates
will create both chaos and resentment.
Skipping a well-qualified woman of color will be conspicuous. Let's not do that.
But, either way, it's not autocratic.
There are people who don't like Biden in this,
and might even be described as anti-Biden, but that group is not the Steppers.
I'll call the third group the Disillusioned.
Some Disillusioned are just shrugging quietly, some are actively bitter.
This group either won't vote or will vote third party.
The Disillusioned are not Steppers.
They don't care any more what Biden does, because they've washed their hands of it.
The fact that there exists a Disillusioned group is the primary reason, I think,
that Biden's numbers are suffering.
He was suffering even before the debate.
But the debate gave us a reason to talk about Biden's poll numbers.
The Steppers are worried about how many Disillusioned there are.
In many cases, they've talked to the Disillusioned to try to get them to come back,
to explain how important it is to back the Dems.
That discussion usually goes nowhere and is painful.
For the Stayers not to acknowledge that the Steppers
have made such good faith arguments to the Disillusioned that the Stayers have pointlessly
made to the Steppers (because the Steppers are not the ones walking away,
they are just remarking on the fact of others doing it) is super-annoying
and incredibly disrespectful and unproductive.
People have become disillusioned for may reasons, but Gaza is a big one.
No amount of saying the war should finally end is going to get them back.
They're mad about the genocide, and
they're hearing “it's time to end this”
as “our genocide has killed as many as is productive.”
That doesn't appease them. They need an admission that a very bad thing
is already done and still ongoing and we've supported that.
They think someone must take blame.
It's hard to see the Disillusioned-by-Gaza coming back at all,
but if they do they'll want Biden, who made us complicit, gone.
For that reason alone, Biden cannot heal this by staying.
Some Disillusioned are also worried about age.
Some may have seen someone among family or friends go downhill.
They know how quickly it can happen. They know it doesn't happen all at once,
but at first it's "now and then". No amount of showing a good day will convince them there aren't bad days.
That's going to still haunt them.
To them, Biden's reassurances sound like a promise of a brave face that may hide a hidden truth.
Plus, defense of Biden's gaffes gives cover to Trump's.
Some Disillusioned just don't want a choice of two old white guys. That's only fixed by Biden stepping aside.
Biden and the Stayers keep showing us people who like him,
but no Stepper doubts there are such people so that helps not at all.
The Stayers point to good days, but no amount of good days rebut the possibility of bad days.
The Stayers point to past accomplishments, but no past accomplishment is proof of a future one.
A lot of pointless, wasted talk at crossed purposes.
The Steppers aren't the ones walking away. They're just observing that OTHERS are.
Tonight's [July 11, 2024] press conference did not speak to those others.
Author's Notes:
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Only very light editing was done to create this almost-mirror copy,
to make a references to “tonight” clearer and to make better use of bold and italic,
which are not available on Mastodon.
Note from the original essay:
I wanted to refer to logical proof rules for universal and existential quantifications, but I went for less nerdy English instead, hoping to be more accessible to all.
This is an amazing amount of power,
as we are on track to learn once Biden finishes wasting this power doing nothing
and leaves us with Trump as his successor.
“This nation was founded on the principle that there are no kings in America.
… Each of us is equal before the law.
… No one is above the law,
not even the President of the United States.
With today’s Supreme Court decision on Presidential immunity, that fundamentally changed.
… For all practical purposes,
today’s decision almost certainly means that
there are virtually no limits on what a President can do.
This is a fundamentally new principle and it’s a dangerous precedent because the power of the office
will no longer be constrained by the Law, even including the Supreme Court of the United States.
The only limits will be self-imposed by the President alone.”
Trump is not just Biden’s adversary, but he is the adversary of free society.
He has said so.
He has promised to be a dictator on day one,
and he means it.
He will not waste this newly conjured kingly power doing nothing,
but rather undoing what Biden has done for
gun safety,
gender equality,
environment, etc.
Alongside all that, he will proceed immediately to do rampant evil,
as laid out in detailed published plans
that his ultra-conservative allies are calling
“Project 2025.”
For a few months, though, such extraordinary power resides in Biden.
And what will he do with this power?
He rushes to promise us that he will not use it, not even for good,
not even to assure that we do not end up with Trump as dictator.
Nor to assure that these ridiculous changes by the Court are rolled back.
Note also that We The People are helpless here, glued to our TVs and phones,
sifting news and social media for clues about what will happen to us.
Give any one of us the power that the Supreme Court gave Biden, and we could do a lot of good,
fix a lot of problems, and make the US safer for democracy than Biden is promising to do.
We know that because Biden is promising to do nothing with this extraordinary power.
That’s a pretty low bar for any one of us to exceed.
Failing to Protect Us
Biden wants to do things in the same old tired way.
He wants to use his centrist tools of inaction,
treating any real opportunity to make a difference as something not to do.
Something too radical. Not his preferred way.
He’d rather labor slowly, expecting consensus with the MAGA crowd when there is none to be had,
and he would rather not use the new tool,
a tool that Trump and the MAGA-majority Supreme Court are counting on him not to use.
They have given him a loaded weapon and are counting on him to deliver it, still loaded, still unused,
to his successor,
who will not leave it unused,
who will in all likelihood use that weapon to assure he does not ever have a successor,
that he just stays in power for life.
“At the outset of our nation,
it was the character of George Washington, our first President,
that defined the Presidency. He believed power was limited, not absolute,
and that power always resides with The People. Always.
Now, over 200 years later, with today’s Supreme Court decision,
once again it will depend on the character of the men and women
who hold that Presidency that are going to define the limits of the power of the Presidency
because the Law will no longer do it.
I know I will respect the limits of the Presidential powers that I have for three and a half years.
But any President, including Donald Trump, will now be free to ignore the Law.
I concur with Justice Sotomayor’s dissent today.
… She said,
‘In every use of official power, the President is now a King above the law.
With fear for our democracy, I dissent.’
So should the American people dissent. I dissent.
”
We are in danger. Biden sees the danger, but does not see that he is part of the planned
delivery mechanism for that danger, and that he is willingly and complacently accepting that role.
It's like Biden sees someone coming at him with a club or a knife in a dark alley
and decides to use debate to protect himself even as someone is trying to hand him a pistol.
All well and good if he's by himself and can take full personal responsibility for that ridiculous choice,
but he is charged here with protecting the Constitution and the nation.
We Need Real Action
Strong language, politely delivered, will not protect us here.
An offer of centrist consensus-building with the MAGA right will not protect us either.
Oh, sure, he can probably find something to collaborate with MAGA about,
but it will amount to mere distraction,
one of those inconsequential things that still loses us our democracy
even as it adds to his list of accomplishments.
Part of the problem is that Biden thinks that the doing of everyday horse trading
is his job. At this point, it is not.
He doesn't need more legislative successes.
If the successes he has are not impressing anyone, adding more will not fix that.
He has a lot of experience as a Senator, but at this point, we need him to stop
being some kind of Senator in Chief
and just be the Commander in Chief.
He needs now to secure democracy. That is his job.
And it cannot be done by compromising with the party that seeks to disassemble democracy.
It must be done by actually confronting that party, using any and all tools at hand.
He thinks he's doing all he can, and maybe he is doing all he can.
But he is not doing all that could be done.
Inaction at this point is dangerous.
The tool he's been given, this new superpower, may not be Biden's preferred tool,
but it IS adequate to the task.
He is just choosing not to use it because he doesn’t like the look of it.
That alone is sufficient reason for We The People to want a different leader,
both now while that power exists and in the next Presidential term if possible.
Coaxing the Genie back into the Bottle
It’s good that Biden knows this new Presidential immunity poses a danger to democracy,
but it’s not enough to just know it.
He needs to insist that the Court take back that power now,
not taking “no” for an answer.
Inaction is insufficient. Fortunately, given this new superpower,
better options are available.
I’ll offer a hypothetical, just for conversation,
but hopefully it will demonstrate that
stronger and more effective action is possible,
and that it is neither necessary nor advisable to wait until the election.
After all, the election could go very awry. It is reckless to wait and hope it will not.
This new reality entitles him to not just suggest but insist it be dealt with now.
He can insist that the Supreme Court
create ethics rules, term limits, and accountability.
So here is my hypothetical scenario for discussion:
Biden could explain that,
in order to preserve Democracy and hold Monarchy at bay,
he is ordering poor old Seal Team Six
to hunt down and execute all conservative justices on the Supreme Court
so that he can install judges with better sense, but
that he has stayed execution of that action—for which he has absolute immunity—by 3 weeks,
just in case the Court can move (expeditiously, for once) to find a better way
to protect the Constitution and the nation with less bloodshed,
for example by vacating their recent extraordinarily ill-advised
and outright reckless ruling, removing the power of Presidents to take such actions confident of their immunity.
I like to think that such an approach would end with better accountability for Presidents and no one injured.
It might seem an extreme way to get there,
but it absolutely pales by comparison to what we should expect if Trump is elected.
Supreme Blind Spot
An action with parameters such as I’ve described would also help SCOTUS see the very real danger they’ve created.
Fixing the problem would allow a happier outcome for us all, even SCOTUS themselves.
They may not realize it, but they are in danger due to their own ruling
in ways that they’re not taking seriously enough.
They blithely discuss a President authorizing SEAL Team Six to take out political rivals,
yet fail to see that they themselves might be such rivals?
It leaves me questioning not just their lack of neutrality, but their competence.
It is short-sighted and dangerous,
and poor judgment to the point of recklessness.
I expect more of Supreme Court Justices.
Biden Isn't The Leader We Need
This is no time for Biden to sit on his hands.
It’s a time for bold actions proportional to the danger,
actions suddenly well within the scope of Biden’s new powers,
and capable of being done with noble purpose,
not that the new Supreme Court ruling requires noble purpose for President acts any more.
That's part of the problem.
The Court has given Biden this power, so they must intend him to use it, right?
Or maybe they just intended the power for Trump and calculated that Biden was too wimpy
to use it.
I'd concur with them on that calculation, by the way. He is too wimpy.
He's confirmed that by prematurely promising not to use it. That's a self-inflicted wound.
He didn't have to say that, for the same reason that Presidents don't say “we won't strike first with atomic weapons.”
It's not that we plan to, but we don't want our adversaries relying on our self-restraint.
I don't think Biden wargamed this. I think he just tied his own hands without thinking.
Now, if he uses the power, even to help eliminate it,
he'll have people fussing at him.
But so be it.
I see it as dereliction of duty if he declines to use it.
Letting his successor, probably Trump, be the first to explore this unlimited power is terrifying
because it will be too late at that point for the public to react in any meaningful way to defend itself.
It was reckless even just to say out loud that he wouldn't use the power.
I get why he wanted to. I get why it's uncomfortable.
But right now he is the one we have elected to do the uncomfortable things.
Better him than Trump. He, at least, is acting in the nation's best interests, not just his own.
Sadly, I’m pretty confident Biden isn't up to it.
I think he'll disappoint us.
Not just disappoint us, but outright fail us.
He sees its use as lacking decorum,
even as somehow he sees no lack of decorum in abrogating his responsibility to protect us
and leaving us at material risk of a Trump presidency with unlimited power still in full effect.
He thinks by saying these are the stakes that surely no one will elect Trump.
That's a dangerous game and one we're all too likely to lose.
Telling us to go vote is just not adequate.
Assuring us that we have the final say would be laughable if not so serious.
It will be great to rely on voting once a proper democracy is restored,
but right now there is no guarantee of the vote’s outcome,
or that the outcome won't be challenged,
ultimately winding up in the Supreme Court to be overturned by the same folks that brought us the recent Presidential immunity ruling.
They have meddled in elections before,
and nothing stops them from doing it again,
especially now that they have lost all shame.
Immediate action is needed to put things to right, while Biden has the power.
He must use that power. Carefully. But he must use it.
The safety of the Constitution and the nation demands it.
I doubt he is up to this most important of tasks. But I'll be happy to be surprised.
A Nation of Laws
Our nation needs to be a nation of laws. For everyone. No exceptions.
We already make exceptions for acts that are necessary.
We have laws against murder, but we let people off if it’s self defense.
We have laws about copyright violation, but we let people off for fair use.
But we have not had laws that expressly said that people could walk free merely for who they are,
only laws that insist they are doing things for good motive.
Will that scare some Presidents?
It’s never scared them in the past.
Or maybe the ones that it did scare didn't run for office. Good for them.
Presidents have always had to fear that breaking laws might get them in trouble
and yet the nation has functioned well for two and a half centuries.
Let Presidents continue to fear the Law.
Let them continue to have to justify deviations.
If a President hesitates to start a war
or authorize a covert action
or explode a weapon of mass destruction, well,
that’s good.
Hesitation isn’t bad.
I want a President to know that breaking the law cannot be a casual decision.
It cannot be just another day on the job.
They must be prepared to later justify questionable actions.
Having to account is part of the job.
It is what makes us a democracy.
The President is accountable to The People, not the other way around.
Let Presidents assume that We The People understand these are hard decisions,
and that we’ll make exceptions for technical breaches of law that are justly done in the best interest of the nation.
But let them sweat a bit. That’s healthy.
By contrast, this newly conjured law, brought into existence out of nowhere Monday by a rogue Court, not Congress, that says Presidents must not be made to sweat, must not be asked to account, is not healthy.
Some have advanced the fairytale notion that voting is how Presidents should be called to account.
But it is not a crazy hypothetical to think that a President might try to stay illegally in power.
We’ve seen evidence that Trump might do this.
He’s said aloud that it’s something he thought about.
And, anyway, there is a lot of damage that can be done in the four years between elections,
if we're lucky enough to ever have them again after a President decides he wants to be a dictator.
So elections are not an appropriate check.
We need better.
Let Presidents sweat. We’ll be safer for it.
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