The Truth Is Knocking. Let It In

You might as well answer the door, my child, the truth is furiously knocking.

- Lucille Clifton

What does holding power to account mean?

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, to make someone accept that they are responsible for something and explain their actions or decisions: Holding those in power to account is the essence of democracy.

Power and Corruption

Here are two examples of abuse of power and the result of two recent investigations that hold power to account. Both are from an article in Slate, 

The Matt Gaetz Report Is a Reminder That Investigations Actually Matter

By Dahlia Lithwick

When the long-awaited House Ethics committee report on Matt Gaetz came out Monday morning, it offered a stark reminder of how vital it is to continue to carry out thorough investigations, especially as investigators are being increasingly vilified. Today we know much that we did not previously know about Gaetz’s fitness to hold public office. That is to the benefit of absolutely everyone. And anyone who thinks differently should have to explain why we should have remained in the dark.

Matt Gaetz

The committee’s findings were horrific. The 42-page document, which Gaetz tried unsuccessfully to suppress, found the former congressman had “violated House Rules and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress.” (Gaetz has denied all of the allegations). Their investigation found that Donald Trump’s first pick for the chief law enforcement officer of the United States had, among other things, purchased drugs including cocaine and ecstasy on multiple occasions; accepted gifts, including transportation and lodging in the Bahamas, in excess of permissible amounts; paid tens of thousands of dollars to women for sex; lied to the State Department about the identity of one of these women so that she could get an American passport; and paid a 17-year-old girl—a high school junior. 

Justice Clarence Thomas

All of this brought to mind another recent investigation: the brand new 93-page report released by Democratic staff members of the Judiciary Committee, detailing yet more ethics violations committed by Justice Clarence Thomas. Amid the new revelations were two additional trips paid for by Thomas’ billionaire patron Harlan Crow that had not been disclosed, even as Thomas has scrambled to amend his various filings to keep up with journalism. The new trips came to light only because the committee had subpoenaed Crow.

Is It A Moot Point?

No charges have been brought, Republicans deny accountability, and attack the investigators, but the word is now out, and that matters. It matters because the truth is a way forward. Acquiescence to power ends our democracy. 

We now have the emergence of the very powerful Tech Brotherhood within the MAGA alliance. They are pro tech, pro capitalism, anti-regulation, and pro H-1B visa. They are causing a split in MAGA world over their stand on allowing certain people of color into our country. I am not comfortable with the new tech oligarchy ruling America. Will they feed the hungry? Will they house the homeless, including 155,000 children sleeping in the streets tonight? Will they make sure our health care system is affordable, and includes empathy and compassion unlike the algorithms that deny coverage to millions? I'm not optimistic. They are condescending to the MAGA base and to the rest of us. 

Push back is essential from the free press and from everyday citizens. Hold our elected representatives to account, or in a very short while we will hardly recognize our country. 

I Am Only One Person

First, you are not alone. You've heard, "Where two or three gather...?" That's the beginning of something much larger. Small groups grew into the civil rights movement.

We have power over our elected officials. Even in gerrymandered districts, it is possible to affect change. Representatives are chosen by the public to decide on its behalf the policies and actions to be pursued by a Government and are charged with acting in the best interests of his and her constituents. In doing so representatives are accountable to their constituents for their actions. 

-gao

When Good People Do Nothing

The Price of Loyalty?

Have you been in a situation where the boss asks you to shade the facts, look for stats to support their case or conduct research that is meant to support a predetermined assumption? Yeah, I've been there in public broadcasting. Nothing I did for my bosses rose anywhere near the level we've experienced in the last four years.

The text below is from an op-ed piece in the NYTimes. Erica Newland worked in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department from 2016-18. Her job was to make Trump's attacks on the justice system and democracy more palatable to the courts. Her posting is a Mea culpa for not doing more to push back. She regrets enabling Trump. Her efforts the last two years in the justice department to mollify Trump have led to guilt. They weren't worth it.

Before the 2020 election, I was haunted by what I didn’t do. By all the ways I failed to push back enough. Now, after the 2020 election, I’m haunted by what I did. The trade-off wasn’t worth it.

In giving voice to those trying to destroy the rule of law and dignifying their efforts with our talents and even our basic competence, we enabled that destruction. Were we doing enough good elsewhere to counterbalance the harm we facilitated, the way a public health official might accommodate the president on the margins to push forward on vaccine development? No.

No matter our intentions, we were complicit. We collectively perpetuated an anti-democratic leader by conforming to his assault on reality. We may have been victims of the system, but we were also its instruments. No matter how much any one of us pushed back from within, we did so as members of a professional class of government lawyers who enabled an assault on our democracy — an assault that nearly ended it.

We owe the country our honesty about that and about what we saw. We owe apologies. I offer mine here.

Perhaps hope for the future lies in part with people like Erica Newman's willing to step forward and take responsibility for their actions. A lot of damage has been done. There are many who will never believe the facts. They've fallen down the rabbit hole of an alternate reality.

Where do we go from here?

If you do nothing in a difficult time,

your strength is limited.

Rescue those being taken off to death,

and save those stumbling toward slaughter.

If you say, “But we didn’t know about this,”

won’t He who weighs hearts consider it?

Won’t He who protects your life know?

Won’t He repay a person according to his work?

-Proverbs 24

 John Stuart Mill said in 1867: “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” 

The consequence of doing nothing is all around us. So many have died unnecessarily from our 21st century plague. Discrimination, racism and hatred is rampant. Children are separated from their families. People legally seeking asylum from violence are made to wait in squalid camps outside our borders.  The fouling of our air and water. Voter suppression. Attempts at subverting the election. There's so much more. The list of wrong doing seems daunting. 

It is not time to shrug our shoulders and say, "Oh well." Our system has worked because of checks and balances, That system has been under attack for quite some time now. The fruits of that strategy have come to a head under Trump. Pushing back, ensuring the checks and balances, needs to be applied against the abuses of the past and into the future.

Voter Suppression

Voter Suppression and Republicans

It's Racists

Voter suppression is no longer billy clubs and hoses and dogs. It's administrative rules. It's bureaucratic barriers.It's precincts that seem to close the dead of night. -Stacey Abrams


According to a report last year from Reuters, 1200 precincts in the south closed. "The report comes as Republican-led states impose a range of other restrictions, from shorter voting hours to photo-ID requirements. As turnout has surged in recent elections, voters in cities like Phoenix, Arizona and Atlanta, Georgia, have endured hours-long waits to cast their ballots." Seven counties in Georgia now have only one precinct.


The Guardian reported that places where black and Latino population is growing by the largest numbers in Texas experienced the majority of closures and could benefit Republicans.


Now Republicans are after voting by mail claiming rampant fraud. Trump admitted the real reason. In April, president Trump admitted why he and many Republicans oppose the expansion of voting by mail. In an article by Adam Russell Taylor for Sojourners, he quoted Trump, "Republicans should fit very hard when it comes to state-wide mail-in voting. For whatever reason, doesn't work out well for Republicans." Taylor pointed out Trump does not want to make it easier for people to vote, even amid a pandemic, because it disadvantages Republicans.

It Gets Worse

Propublica reports the falsehoods run rampant on Social Media.
“Outright Lies”: Voting Misinformation Flourishes on Facebook

While the social media giant says it opposes voter suppression, the data shows a stark picture: Nearly half of all top-performing posts that mentioned voting by mail were false or misleading.

Trump’s false attacks on voting by mail had a total of 3.8 million interactions on Facebook. Among them, a Trump post that falsely claimed Nevada had illegally sent out ballots had the most interactions of any post that has mentioned vote by mail in the last 12 months in the U.S. Trump’s false claim that California is sending ballots to “anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there” drew the third most interactions of any post that mentioned voting over the same period, ranking behind a post from Obama and a pro-Trump meme.

In recent months, Trump has also claimed on Facebook that “mail-in ballots will lead to a “RIGGED ELECTION!” and falsely said they are “substantially fraudulent”; he made false statements about the legality of actions taken by election officials in Michigan and Nevada; and he misrepresented his own power to deny funding to states that expand vote by mail. Trump continued those false claims last week, arguing a debunked distinction between mail-in voting and absentee voting.

California Secretary of State Alex Padilla says. “What is frustrating is that Trump can post or tweet whatever he wants without the proper checks and balances.” “What keeps me up at night is that he’s clearly setting the stage to question election results that he might not like in November.”

According to Propublica, for now, misinformation may be difficult to stop before it goes viral. On July 13, conservatives on Facebook pounced on a video in which an unidentified Trump supporter said she was denied the right to vote, apparently in Louisiana. Many of these pages framed it as evidence of voter fraud and a Democratic plot to steal the election. By the time the post was deemed false by PolitiFact, a Facebook fact-checking partner, it had received more than 3.7 million views and been shared more than 170,000 times.

Trump's Travesty of Justice?

Photo credit: Samantha Sophia

Is Anybody Surprised?

Why not?

From The Morning, a daily update from the NY Times.

1. A ‘gross abuse of prosecutorial power’

A court-appointed expert urged a federal judge to reject the Trump administration’s attempt to drop the criminal case against Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser. The expert, a retired federal judge, criticized the Justice Department’s “highly irregular conduct to benefit a political ally of the president.”

Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about his contact with Russia’s ambassador, but the Justice Department later claimed the lies were not “material.” Those claims, the retired judge, John Gleeson, wrote, “are preposterous.”

What’s next: The case will continue on Friday when a three-judge panel on the Court of Appeals considers the case.