It Is Immoral to Misquote Yogi Berra

by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Jun 2, 2020 | Featured, Politics

The one thing that I absolutely believe is: it is immoral to misquote Yogi Berra even if you don’t know who he was

Yesterday, in response to the rioting arising from the death of another black man by white police officers, a liberal friend of mine shook his head and said: “It’s just like déjà vu all over again.”

That quote is not applicable to these killings and protests, even though it may bring to light, unintentionally, our national nightmare.

In July of 1967, Cambridge Maryland was burned and Maryland’s Republican governor, Spiro Agnew, got national attention for blaming the demonstrators for burning down their homes, neighborhoods and destroying property. I know something about this because I was a young boy visiting the Eastern Shore that summer. The experience frightened me out of my youth so much so that years later I wrote a play about it.

President Nixon liked Agnew’s toughness. He needed a “law and order” guy to polarize support for his 1968 election. He chose him as his VP to whip up the masses against the “liberals” in order to rally the “silent majority”. It worked. Nixon won a plurality of the popular vote by a narrow margin but won by a large margin in the electoral college.

Sounds familiar… but still no déjà vu.

Maybe this will help:

Yesterday Fox News reported, “… crews on the scene in SoHo reported hundreds of people stealing from luxury stores —including Chanel and Dior — for hours on Sunday night going into the early hours of Monday morning. The looters were seen piling shoplifted merchandise into vehicles while others rode off with the merchandise in black garbage bags balanced on Citi Bikes.”

Many of the African-Americans who had organized the protests in Cambridge repeatedly said the whites lit the black neighborhoods on fire in Cambridge and then refused to put them out since they controlled the fire trucks. The white press never reported that. Nonetheless, the disturbance was defined as the destruction of “property.”

So maybe we have it wrong and it is about “property” and not “lives.”

Let’s refocus and see if we have a way to save human life by protecting property.

America became rich when it helped to rebuild Europe’s economy after WWII. It wasn’t a “giveaway!” Out of the rubble, we built a trading partner and Europe and the United States have prospered for almost 80 years.

So why can’t we create a 15-year state-sponsored municipal bond to rebuild Baltimore city? Not a “giveaway,” but designed to lower the tax burden on the state as re-development occurs? A long-term commitment to rebuild the city would instantly increase the property values, both commercial and residential and bring in national and international investors.

What a perfect time for Maryland’s present Republican governor to make Baltimore into a trading partner with the rest of the state. It certainly will be easier than unifying nation states that have been at endless war for the previous thousand years.

All he has to do is sell it to white Americans. The rebuilding could be entirely about eliminating the cost to the state of “giveaways” to Baltimore city.

It’s not a “giveaway” or, even better, about “Black Lives Matter” — it’s about property! Wow what a great selfish idea!

Hey! Let’s make Maryland great again! Baltimore was once one of America’s three most prosperous cities.

… But it won’t happen, because the rebuilding of post-war Europe had no black countries or black cities and that was our foreign policy, not our domestic policy.

The Constitution, at a minimum, sidestepped slavery or at worst supported it with the Electoral College. And after all slaves were “property.” Maybe racism is in the American DNA.

So in this case, Yogi Berra and my friend were wrong. You can’t have “Déjà vu all over again.” The situation is not repeating because it has never ended.

 
Photo by Kenneth K. Lam, Baltimore Sun

No, Lindsey, You Can’t Do That!

by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Jan 7, 2020 | Featured, Politics

We deserve better than this.

Senator Lindsey Graham just announced that the Senate might change its rules to require Nancy Pelosi to submit the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate so that the Senate can have a trial (and McConnell now claims to have the votes to prohibit testimony and new evidence).

There are two problems with Senator Graham’s analysis.

First, the Constitution won’t allow it. Senator Graham apparently has not read Article 1, Section 2: “The House of Representatives… Shall have the sole power of impeachment.” And Article 1, Section 3: “The Senate shall have the sole power to try all impeachments.”

The House is the prosecutor and the Senate is the jury. So, until Nancy Pelosi decides to present the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate, the Senate can’t do anything but wait.

Second, the situation does not allow it. Every day new evidence comes out that has been withheld by the President and should have been part of the impeachment articles.

The House should reopen the impeachment hearings, subpoena the witnesses and documents, hold those that do not comply in contempt, and wait until they comply.

As I have written previously, the Speaker of the House in an impeachment proceeding has a duty to every citizen of the USA to ensure that the constitutional requirements of an impeachment trial will be carried out before she proceeds to the trial in the Senate. She is the lead prosecutor. That is her duty.

It would be a dereliction of that duty, a violation of the Constitution, and an acquiescence to obstruction of justice to proceed with a trial knowing that the defendant is withholding witnesses and documents, and that the jury has predetermined a verdict of acquittal before the trial begins.

She must wait for the federal courts to enforce the Constitution and order the witnesses appear and the documents be produce and are available for consideration at the trial before the Senate. She must not compromise . She must put the spotlight on the head-on collision between fascist partisan politics and the clear violation of our Constitution . The politicians are in control and we deserve better than this.

The senators will take their oath “of objectivity” and for many the hypocrisy quite possibly can’t be stopped. (It might be fun if the prosecution asks Chief Justice Roberts, the judge in this case, for the right to voir dire the jury to determine if there is pre-existing bias, which should require disqualification of senators who have publicly stated that they have made up their minds and are working for the defendant.) No matter what, however, Pelosi must wait for the federal court’s rulings requiring the testimony of witnesses and production of documents.

We can wait. Time is not the enemy of the country in all of this, but it is the enemy of an obstructionist defendant.
President Trump and Senator McConnell will show their hand if they lambast Pelosi for waiting for a court ruling, because they will show that the court and the delay is what they really fear.

They want to force a vote by a biased jury so they can declare victory in the President’s campaign. But if they are forced to wait, and they lose in the courts (as they will) before or even after the election, they will not be able to sweep their obstruction under the rug. It will be a historical record. It will be irrefutable.

Time is not the enemy! Given the time and a chance to talk together, more people will have a chance to understand and get it right. Nixon was elected by every state of the union except Massachusetts. Two years later, he resigned when it became clear he was about to be impeached by a bipartisan vote.

So, in fact, time and the Federal Courts are Pelosi’s ally. The more she waits out the storm and requires that the Constitution be respected, the more President Trump and Senator McConnell will be punished for their stonewalling and other violations when the courts rule against them.

Even though it is presently unsubstantiated, I fear that the President may attempt to use a foreign conflict to unify the country to avoid further focus on the impeachment. If that turns out to be true, that would be both frightening and further grounds for impeachment.

This must not be about election politics. It is about whether we can hold on to our Constitution and who we are as a country.
The question is: Does Pelosi have the guts to withstand the storm and represent all the people of the United States, not just the Democrats?

These are horrible times for all of us. The politicians must not control and divide us. We deserve all the facts and an unbiased jury. We are all Americans and a fair trial is the very heart of what keeps us free.

A Memory of a Soon Forgotten Past?

by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Dec 10, 2019 | Featured, Politics

Today, I am mourning a Republican U.S. Senator that I was fortunate to know and serve during the impeachment proceedings of Richard Nixon. I must be wrong.

As the Republican-controlled United States Senate will soon consider impeachment, I have grown horrified by the contrast between what I thought I remembered and what I see today. I must be wrong.

So I went back and reread Senator Charles “Mac” Mathias’s obituary to check my recollection. I will quote the obituary from The New York Times below:

 “In a 1974 campaign speech [Mathias] quoted Burke’s 1774 letter to the Electors of Bristol: ‘Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.’”

I thought I remembered that Mathias believed he served the constitution rather than a political party and did not hesitate to practice these beliefs and defend them publicly:

“I’m not all that liberal,” he told The Washington Post in 1974. “In fact, in some respects I’m conservative. A while ago I introduced a bill preserving the guarantees of the Bill of Rights by prohibiting warrantless wiretaps. I suppose they’ll say it’s another liberal effort, but it’s as conservative as you can get. It’s conserving the Constitution.”

I remembered that Mathias exercised these beliefs often at his own expense.

“However he described them, his votes, his vocal unhappiness with the growing conservatism of the Republican Party and his lack of support for Ronald Reagan cost him leadership positions. In 1979, Senator Strom Thurmond maneuvered to block Mr. Mathias from becoming senior Republican on the Judiciary Committee.”

Although he desperately wanted to be the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he saw his responsibilities to serve a greater bipartisan agenda.

“His Senate colleague for many years, Paul Sarbanes, Democrat of Maryland, said Monday that while Mr. Mathias’s ‘most intense critics were within his own party,’ nevertheless ‘Mac commanded enormous respect on both sides of the aisle.’”

Mathias practiced the clear intent of the Constitution, unlike the recent Republican appointees to the Supreme Court who affirmed Citizens United and refused to address the political polarization of gerrymandering.

“Mathias advocated public financing of campaigns and ceilings on contributions (measures enacted the next year). He said that in his 1974 campaign he would reject cash contributions, take no more than $100 from any individual, report every contribution and expenditure”

My recollection was correct.

All that is gone now. The strict constructionist of the Constitution will cite the clear definition of treason, which requires aiding and abetting the enemy at the time of war, and will think nothing of a President and political party that will not impeach a president for turning foreign affairs to his political benefit, who refuses to fight and actually encourages the support and intervention of foreign governments in our elections.

All that is gone now, as our foreign policies, so carefully crafted after WWII to support the allies of freedom, crumble as we abandon the Kurds to Russia, and our allies in South Korea and Japan to the threat of North Korea, as it continues missile testing despite hollow promises to us. And finally, and perhaps most painfully, Europe turns to others as we let NATO and the European Union crumble before our blind eyes.

The Republicans will let the impeachment fail. But if the country gives this president another term, America, a shining “city on a hill,” will be gone as we know it.