Trump Has Taught Me to Fear My Fellow Americans

If one is a LGBT American, one knows all too well that hate and bigotry that continues to flourish in America, particularly among those who see themselves as "godly Christians" and to a lesser extent "patriotic Americans." The hatred at times is palpable and we gays know what it is like to fear for our safety at times simply because of who we are. With the rise of Donald Trump and so-called Trumpism, more Americans are coming to grasp just how prevalent hate and bigotry is in America. Yes, the GOP has fostered racism and homophobia for years as a means to rally the bigoted to the polls, but with Trump, we are seeing something far more blatant and willingness to use threats of violence against those deemed "other."  A column in the Washington Post looks at the phenomenon and just how scary some of our fellow countryman are in fact.  Here are column excerpts:

What word comes to mind when you see the name Donald Trump? For some people, it might be “anger,” since he provokes it and stokes it. For others, it might be “ignorance,” since he knows so little and, like many unburdened by knowledge, is untroubled by facts. Some might say “fear,” since it would take some scary police tactics to push 11 million people over the border to Mexico. For me, none of those words suffices. I would say “betrayal.”

It is the word that comes to mind almost on a nightly basis when I see some Trump surrogate defend Trump’s positions on one of the cable news shows. How can you? I want to ask. Do you believe that the government should apply a religious test to let people into this country? Christians? Yes. Jews? Sure. Buddhists, Hindus and Zoroastrians, step this way. Muslims, not so fast.

Do the people who support Trump realize that they are betraying not merely Muslims but the principles that the United States stands for? We don’t apply religious tests to anything. In that way, we are different than some other countries. In that way, we are better.

I can abide policy differences but I cannot abide indifference to bigotry. And neither should any of Trump’s supporters.

I felt that same, awful feeling of betrayal when Trump mocked a physically disabled reporter for the New York Times. Did Trump’s people notice? Did they care? Aren’t Americans supposed to stick up for one another?

Donald Trump has taught me to fear my fellow American. I don’t mean the occasional yahoo who turns a Trump rally into a hate fest. I mean the ones who do nothing. Who are silent. Who look the other way. If you had told me a year ago that a hateful brat would be the presidential nominee of a major political party, I would have scoffed. Someone who denigrated women? Not possible. Someone who insulted Mexicans? No way. Someone who mocked the physically disabled? Not in America. Not in my America.

When I see these Trump supporters on television — the commentators, the Politician’s Puttanesca (a dish to poison the body politic) — I have to wonder where they would draw the line. The answer seems to be: nowhere.

Muslims and Mexicans are merely collateral damage in a war that must be fought. What about blacks or Jews? Not yet.

Maybe the talking heads on TV would draw the line at some mild version of fascism, but would the American people do the same? Here, I must hesitate. The easy yes of yesteryear has given way to awful doubt. Trump could win. . . . When Trump insisted that he could compel a military officer to obey an illegal order, I heard the echo of jackboots on cobblestone.

History nags. It admonishes. “American exceptionalism” is a phrase that refers to the past, not necessarily the future. Nothing is guaranteed. I’d like to think that Americans really are exceptional, that we have an exceptional faith in democracy and the rule of law. I now have some doubt. I always knew who Trump was. It’s the American people who have come as a surprise.

With Donald Trump set to meet this month with a who's who of the leaders of anti-gay hate groups, I cannot help but wonder if gays will be added to Trump's list of enemies of :real Americans."  It is indeed frightening.

No Senate Supreme Court Blockade Has Happened in American History

Many on the right and lazy journalists who care more about appearing "fair and balanced" are striving to claim that the unprecedented obstructionism by Republican Senators is anything but out of the norm.   But as a piece in New York Magazine explains, what Senate Republicans are doing by announcing that they will not consider any Supreme Court nominee put forward by President Obama regardless of who the nominee might be is, in fact without precedent in American history.  If one reads the relevant portion of the United States Constitution, it provides that the president SHALL nominate a nominee to fill an opening on the Court.  In legal parlance, shall means that the president has no discretion.  He MUST put forward a nominee. As for the Senate, it is then to advise and consent and hold hearings on the nominee.  In short, Senate republicans are subverting the Constitution - even though their oath of office requires them to uphold the U.S. Constitution.  Here are article highlights:

Senate Republicans announced today that they would refuse to consider any candidate nominated by President Obama for the Supreme Court. The Constitution gives the Senate the right to offer advice and consent on Court nominees. The two bodies have frequently quarreled over just how much power each is entitled over a nomination. Sometimes, senators have granted presidents wide latitude. At other times, they have insisted on forcing the president to nominate a jurist with mainstream views. But never before in American history has the Senate simply refused to let the president nominate anybody at all simply because it was an election year.

One can defend the moral or procedural legitimacy of the Republican escalation. But few Republicans or conservative intellectuals have done so. Instead they have asserted that they are merely following historical precedent. This is demonstrably false.

The first defense, offered up on the fly by Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio at the Republican presidential debate that happened to take place that night, relied on “80 years of precedent” of presidents abstaining from nominating anybody to the Court in an election year. This precedent has turned out to be a complete fiction. Presidents have nominated, and Senates have confirmed, numerous justices to the Court, as law professorAmy Howe pointed out. The Senate did reject Abe Fortas’s elevation to chief justice in 1968, but it did so out of opposition to Fortas’s allegedly improper ties to the administration, not out of a principled rejection of President Johnson’s right to alter the Court in an election year.

The initial insistence that the Senate traditionally blocks any election-year appointments has fallen by the wayside for lack of any supporting evidence.  Instead Republicans have fallen back to insisting that Democrats have advocated blocking Court nominees in an election year.

The first alleged example of a Democrat advocating a full election-year blockade is a widely disseminated partial quote by Senator Charles Schumer from 2007 . . . . Schumer’s proposed solution was not to stop any Bush nominee, but to require evidence of their moderation in their judicial record, not merely in promises they would make. One could believe Schumer was demanding too much deference for the Senate. But he was not arguing that the Senate should refuse to consider any nomination at all. . . . .  But the circumstances did not arise because there was no Supreme Court vacancy at all. Schumer’s remarks, which did not say what Krauthammer claims they said, were completely hypothetical.

A second example of Democrats allegedly advocating the current Republican position comes from recently unearthed 1992 remarks by Joe Biden, then a senator. But Biden was not advocating a blockade of any nomination by then-president George Bush. He was insisting that Bush compromise ideologically.

 

Both these remarks are within the historic tradition of senators tussling over how much say their chamber should have in the ideology of a new justice. But neither of them advocated flat-out blocking the president from any nomination, however moderate or well-qualified.

And maybe the old system, in which social norms dictate that the Senate allow the president to put his ideological imprint on the Court, is simply untenable in a polarized age. Maybe that system was bound to perish. . . . But the clear fact is that they [Democrats] didn’t kill that system and they didn’t create the new one that is taking its place. The current Senate Republicans did.

Scalia Was an Intellectual Phony and a Bigot

Some say that is it bad form to speak ill of the dead.  I take the position that it is even poorer form to lie and speak well of those who don't deserve to be lauded simply because they are no longer among the living.  This latter concept is lost on those gushing with kind words for the late Antonin Scalia who, contrary to what one is hearing now, wasn't a brilliant jurist.  He was instead a pompous bigot in love with his own perceived but non-existent brilliance.  The constitutional rights of the many took a back seat to Scalia's own racial and religious prejudices and a number of his positions have lead to some of America's current problems, such as the horrific Citizens United decision and the unrestrained gun rights now pushing deaths by gun violence to exceed automobile accident deaths.  Americans should be giving a shy of relief with the man gone. A piece in Salon looks at the truth about Scalia's less than brilliant career.  A second piece looks at Scalia's undisguised animus toward LGBT Americans.  First, these highlights from Salon:

 Scalia was not a great judge: he was a bad one.  And his badness consisted precisely in his contempt for the rule of law, if by “the rule of law” one means the consistent application of legal principles, without regard to the political consequences of applying those principles in a consistent way.

One of Scalia’s many obnoxious qualities as a jurist was his remarkably pompous, pedantic, and obsessive insistence that the legal principles he (supposedly) preferred – textualism in statutory interpretation, originalism when reading the Constitution, and judicial restraint when dealing with democratically-enacted legal rules – were not merely his preferences, but simply “the law.”

Given that those principles are and always have been controversial among American judges, lawyers, and politicians, insisting that they ought to control judicial interpretation as a matter of definition makes about as much sense as arguing for the desirability of, say, a particular income tax rate by claiming that the advocate’s preferred rate simply is the “true” rate (in other words it’s a nonsensical argument on its face).

But this kind of question-begging nonsense was the least of Scalia’s judicial faults.  For the truth is that, far more than the average judge, Scalia had no real fidelity to the legal principles he claimed were synonymous with a faithful interpretation of the law.  Over and over during Scalia’s three decades on the Supreme Court, if one of his cherished interpretive principles got in the way of his political preferences, that principle got thrown overboard in a New York minute.

I will give just three out of many possible examples.  In affirmative action cases, Scalia insisted over and over again that the 14th Amendment required the government to follow color-blind policies.  There is no basis for this claim in either the text or history of the amendment.  Indeed Scalia simply ignored a rich historical record that reveals, among other things, that at the time the amendment was ratified, the federal government passed several laws granting special benefits to African-Americans, and only African-Americans.

No honest originalist reading of the Constitution would conclude that it prohibits affirmative action programs, but Justice Scalia was only interested in originalism to the extent that it advanced his political preferences.

Similarly, the men who drafted and ratified the First Amendment would, it’s safe to say, been shocked out of their wits if someone had told them they were granting the same free speech rights to corporations they were giving to persons.   Again as a historical matter, this idea is an almost wholly modern invention: indeed it would be hard to come up with a purer example of treating the Constitution as a “living document,” the meaning of which changes as social circumstances change.  In other words, it would be difficult to formulate a clearer violation of Scalia’s claim that the Constitution should be treated as if it is “dead dead dead.”

Finally, and most disgracefully, Justice Scalia played a key role in the judicial theft of the 2000 presidential election.  He was one of five justices who didn’t bother to come up with something resembling a coherent legal argument for intervening in Florida’s electoral process.  A bare majority of the Court handed the election to George W. Bush, and the judges making up that majority did so while trampling on the precise legal principles Justice Scalia, in particular, claimed to hold so dear: judicial restraint, originalist interpretation, and respect for states’ rights.

These examples are not rare deviations from an otherwise principled adherence to Scalia’s own conception of the rule of law: they were the standard operating procedure for the most over-rated justice in the history of the United States Supreme Court.

As for the piece looking at Scalia's animus toward LGBT citizens, here are excerpts:

It’s a blessed thing for a great many that Scalia is off our high court, though even in death, he continues to bring harm to many who may be silently thankful for his departure.

Our nation is home to an estimated 16 million lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals, an estimate based on a conservative 5 percent of the current U.S. population of 319 million. Scalia targeted, marginalized and slurred our community so often and so routinely, his hatred of LGBT Americans became something of a caricature.  But for us, it was no joke.

It’s important to understand that his bigotry was not only deeply felt, but had the ability to dramatically impact those who were its target.

Had Scalia had his way, for instance, laws criminalizing consensual homosexual sex in the privacy of the homes of consenting adults would still be in force in many states. See his ugly dissent in Lawrence v. Texas for proof, where he compares homosexuality to prostitution, bestiality, heroin use and incest.

To Scalia, such progress not only represented bad law, he didn’t consider LGBT Americans worthy of legal recognition or protection. He thought it entirely appropriate that Americans and their governments be allowed to discriminate against gays and lesbians, that the “moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct,” as he called it, was just and right. Expressing animus toward LGBT individuals and conduct was perfectly fair, to Scalia.

Given that, he saw no problem in denigrating our relationships and lifetime commitments, describing them as no different than roommate situations. He thought laws banning employment discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity amounted to undeserved “special rights.”

And he argued that “deviate sexual intercourse with someone of the same sex” deserved no protection under the law, that states were well within their rights to make such relations illegal and to arrest and prosecute those engaging in such sexual activity.

Rather than mellowing with age, Scalia and his anti-gay bigotry seemed only to sharpen over the years. 

Simply put, America is a far better place with Antonin Scalia no longer among the living.  If there is a Hell, I suspect Scalia is now occupying his reserved seat.