When Joe McCarthy came to Seattle: A new documentary highlights the late senator’s demagogic legacy, just as it dovetails with Donald Trump’s impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate.

originally published on Crosscut.com on January 6, 2020

No one mentioned to the keynote speaker, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, that the Washington State Press Club’s Gridiron banquet was a bacchanalia.

McCarthy’s head juddered in an I’m-a-serious-guy beat, his doughface abruptly draining of color. To the late Seattle Post-Intelligencer writer Joe Miller, the face cried out: “Jeer me.”

“Let me tell you,” McCarthy said midspeech. “I didn’t travel 2,300 miles to be a funny man.”

The air was thick with tobacco and pitched liquor, and the hoots of drunken reporters. At one point, someone tossed a chair.

McCarthy’s sole visit to Seattle on Oct. 23, 1952, to campaign for Dwight Eisenhower and the Republican ticket, was punctuated by gaffes and missteps. Along with his ill-fated gridiron speech, which questioned the anti-Communist bona fides of former Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall, McCarthy was sandbagged during his paid appearance on KING 5 television for impugning without evidence two aides of the national columnist Drew Pearson.       

After McCarthy’s speech, Washington Lt. Gov. Victor Aloysius Meyers, a former band leader, traipsed across the stage and seized the lectern.  

“Let me tell you,” Meyers said, addressing the Wisconsin senator. “I didn’t walk from the bar across the street to be taken seriously.” 

The American Experience’s latest documentary, “McCarthy,” which airs Monday, Jan. 6, on KCTS 9, brings into focus McCarthy’s demagogic legacy, just as it dovetails with President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate. McCarthy-Trump allusions are implicit: In 1952, McCarthy was written off as a paranoid buffoon by the Northwest’s political and media elites, not unlike Trump in 2016.

But McCarthyism, like Trumpism, is a force greater than its namesake. All that’s required is a firebrand to harness extant fear and give it a shove.

By the early 1950, Northwesterners already were smarting from the notorious Albert Canwell Committee hearings. Canwell, a Spokane Republican, served only one term in the Washington state House, from 1946 to 1948, but in that sliver of time he commandeered the chairmanship of the state’s version of the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities to ferret out real and imagined communists at the University of Washington, target labor leader Harry Bridges, and, writes Jim Kershner in HistoryLink, announce that there were “24 identified communists in the Washington state Legislature itself.”   

The drama and hokum inspired a play, Mark Jenkins’ All Powers Necessary and Convenient, and ruined lives. (Melvin Rader’s False Witness remains the best primary source).

McCarthyism also had a Northwest signature, a reflection of Washington and Oregon’s gravitational pull of both left- and right-wing forces. Elements of the vociferous anti-communist campaign manifested during the first Red Scare, in response to the radicalism of the Seattle General Strike of 1919, and reared their head in the notorious Goldmark libel case of 1964.  State Rep. John Goldmark, a well-regarded Democrat, lost his seat in 1962 after a coordinated smear campaign by the editor of the Tonasket Tribune and members of the archright John Birch Society. 

Washington’s first Palmer raid (Alexander Palmer, President Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general, zeroed in on anarchists after a bombing at his home) was launched a few days after the 1919 Centralia Massacre, which pitted American Legionnaires against members of the radical Industrial Workers of the World.

An Associated Press story, which made the front page of the New York Times, noted that 74 IWW members were rounded up in Spokane, along with the editor and a handful of reporters with the Seattle Union Record. As the AP noted, “Governor L.F. Hart of Washington announced he would start a statewide campaign to wipe out the Industrial Workers of the World, Bolsheviki, and other radicals, and called upon all state officials to cooperate in the work with federal and county officials.”  

A few McCarthy-era figures still are shorthand in the political vernacular. (Read: You want to be compared to Margaret Chase Smith and her “Declaration of Conscience.” You don’t want to be compared to the vile Roy Cohn). 

Cohn manifested a particular kind of evil. He was a toady to his boss and embraced his authority as McCarthy’s chief counsel to smash reputations without cause or documentation. Cohn also is the most tangible link to President Trump, serving as Trump’s mentor and personal attorney. Enraged by the Russia-election investigation, Trump demanded of his aides in 2018, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” (It’s also the title of a new documentary on Cohn by Matt Tyrnauer.)

Donald Trump

While fear of communism was the unifying theme of McCarthyism, Trumpism is more of a mosaic, tethered to a disgust for elites, an anti-immigrant agenda and a push to invigorate a gauzy, golden age of American exceptionalism. Historically, it echoes the populist tone of George Wallace, the xenophobic tenets of Pat Buchanan’s 1992 presidential run, the Gingrich revolution and the Tea Party movement. But it’s less definable ideologically, aligning with an American-style cult of personality, as beliefs whipsaw with Trump’s disparate tweets and remarks.

New York University law professor Norman Dorsen described McCarthyism in Bill Dwyer’s book, The Goldmark Case, as “a particularly irresponsible form of persecution for political beliefs.”

“It also conveys a total lack of due process and fairness whereby unverified allegations, made by rabid and often mercenary ideologues, are used to destroy reputations, careers, and families. Too often these tactics are used against strangers within the gates — recent arrivals to a community who are not of the dominant race, religion, or cultural background,” he said.

Trumpism and McCarthyism share tactical features, consistent with creeping authoritarianism: attacks on the free press and democratic norms, lies and falsehoods amplified by a position of authority and an absence of political courage. 

In the Trump era, critics also hanker for a Joseph Welch moment, when the avuncular U.S. army lawyer chided McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

The Army-McCarthy hearings were the turning point. Disenchantment — a public intolerance of intolerance — sealed McCarthy’s fate and his ultimate censure by the U.S. Senate. But the McCarthy hearings also drew an unprecedented 22 million viewers, in a less fractured media and political environment.

Moments of shame, witnessed by a huge swath of Americans, galvanized the country. Americans today, inured to Trump’s lies, bigotry and attacks, may not feel the same urgency.      

Editor’s note: The author’s late father, U.S. Sen. Henry M. Jackson, served as a Democratic member of the Army-McCarthy Committee and was a target of McCarthy’s ’52 Northwest visit. McCarthy was affable in private, the elder Jackson said, but transformed into a paranoid bully in public. Jackson also was repelled by Roy Cohn’s cruelty and delight ripping apart low-level public servants sans evidence.

January 6, 2020 phjackson Leave a response , ,

In Trump’s America, Russian studies are more important than ever: The University of Washington, a leader in international studies, could use some state support.

A woman holds a sign depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump during a protest outside the White House, Tuesday, July 17, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

A woman holds a sign depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump during a protest outside the White House, Tuesday, July 17, 2018, in Washington, D.C. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

originally published on Crosscut.com on July 24, 2018

Herb Ellison radiated kindness, as only certain professors do. Over a long career, he inspired a generation of University of Washington students and future Russianists, while examining the former Soviet Union through the prism of the Cold War and distilling the nuggets for U.S. lawmakers.

Interest in Russian studies cratered after the fall of the former Soviet Union. A 2015 report by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies noted an “unmistakable decline in interest and numbers, in terms of both graduate students and faculty.” A corresponding decrease in federal support, such as so-called Title VI and Title VIII educational programs, has magnified the gap.

The University of Washington is in pretty good shape thanks to the Herbert J. Ellison Center for Russian, Eastern European and Central Asian Studies endowed by the Ellison family, part of a network of Title VI national resource centers. (Ellison retired in 2002 and died in 2012). And the UW is home to eight Title VI centers funded by the U.S. Department of Education to nurture “globally competent citizens and professionals,” more than any other university in the country.

Donald Trump probably would have mocked Ellison’s kinetic love of history — plus Ellison wasn’t a kiss-up. The foreign policy message of the president’s 2016 campaign was “I know more than the generals do” — an un-Ellison-ish strategy unhitched to history and reality.

Trump’s whipsawing temperament was prologue to last week’s I-believe-Putin press conference. From the moment he opened his mouth to his subsequent attempts to clarify while letting Russia off for any continuing targeting of the United States, Trump made clear that he’d never absorbed any of the knowledge available to anyone who sat in Herb Ellison’s classroom.

Boosting higher ed feels like a yawn after Trump’s Russia-first genuflection, but it’s critical over the long term. Who will teach the next generation of diplomats, politicians, and human rights practitioners? Take to the streets — consider it your duty as a citizen — but also agitate for something better. America needs more Herb Ellisons, able to inform people about the world.

There’s a lot to make up for after support for Russian studies bottomed out in the late 1990s and 2000s; this includes a need to fund an additional tenure-track position for a UW Russianist. 

Today, America’s Russia policy lurches with Trump’s impulses, as impulse passes for judgment. The president ridicules Western allies, while mollycoddling tyrants from Putin to the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte to Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Even after the special counsel’s indictment of 12 Russian intelligent agents, Trump said that he didn’t see “any reason why” Russia would meddle or, in attempted revisionism, wouldn’t meddle in the 2016 presidential election, that the European Union is “a foe” and that NATO and the Atlantic Alliance are a costly nuisance. And Trump’s willingness to consider offering up former U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul for Russian questioning marked a culminating point. From Putin’s lips to Trump’s ear.  Make no mistake: The United States could have a thousand more Russianists, each producing original scholarship, each hankering to brief the president, and it would be for nil at the moment. Trump appears intent on elevating Putin and dismantling the liberal international order. 

Someday though the Trump era will end, and Americans will need to cauterize the tears in the Western alliance. For now, we should encourage Washington’s congressional delegation to bolster funding for federal programs that support research on international affairs and squeeze the state Legislature to support a new UW Russianist, presupposing there’s any revenue left in state coffers.

Just look at Trump in Helsinki. History and international studies matter.    

July 24, 2018 phjackson Leave a response , ,

Washington conservationists are Scott free. Now what?: As the EPA administrator’s scandal-plagued tenure comes to an end, the agency faces a future of better behavior and the same bad policy.

Scott Pruitt

originally published on Crosscut.com on July 6, 2018

In this July 4, 2018, photo, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt stands on the South Lawn of the White House during a picnic for military families in Washington. President Donald President Trump tweeted on July 5 that he had accepted Pruitt’s resignation. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Twitter was a’flitter Thursday, as Northwest conservationists and good-government activists marked the “resignation” of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. Pruitt was a lightning rod for the environmental community; a profile in self-dealing, he was swampy and reckless enough to provoke conservatives such as Laura Ingraham to demand he get the heave-ho.

Pruitt also spurred push-back litigation from this Washington and throughout the country. In a statement, Attorney General Bob Ferguson noted that the state has joined or led “nearly a dozen lawsuits” against Pruitt’s EPA, all successful thus far, with three judgments that the EPA cannot appeal.  (Ferguson and Gov. Jay Inslee’s Trump-fighting tag-team press conferences have become so routine that they’ve generated their own backlash.)

“Regardless of his or her political ideology, the EPA must have an ethical, law-abiding leader in order to fulfill its critical mission,” Ferguson said. “If the next EPA administrator fails to learn from Pruitt’s example, we will continue defeating the agency’s actions in court.”

That next administrator is likely to exhibit more guile and better judgment than Pruitt. As the bête noire of Northwest conservationists, Pruitt generated as much righteous anger as Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, James Watt. But the poster boy soon will be replaced by an equally shrewd, landmine-avoiding Andrew Wheeler, a lobbyist extraordinaire.

Much of Washington’s EPA litigation revolves around alleged violations of the Clean Air and Clear Water Acts, as well as ground-level ozone standards, a delay of the Chemical Disaster Rule, and a rule watchdogging emissions for new oil and gas facilities. Another bugaboo that affects Northwest fishers is the proposed Pebble Mine in Bristol Bay, Alaska. On this, Pruitt’s EPA has been hard to pin down.  

In April, both of Washington’s U.S. Senators, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, co-sponsored a no-confidence resolution demanding that Pruitt resign. The resolution’s language is damning. “Administrator Pruitt has continually overridden the recommendations of scientists of the Agency in order to provide relief to industry, leaving in place the use of harmful chemicals, pesticides, and policies that are directly impacting the health and well-being of millions of people of the United States.”

In the Northwest, Pruitt’s tenure also kindles nostalgia for the recondite William Ruckelshaus, the first EPA administrator, who made a return engagement as administrator in 1983 to revive the agency’s culture and high standards in the aftermath of Ronald Reagan’s befuddled first appointee, Ann Gorsuch Burford (the mother of President Trump’s first U.S. Supreme Court appointee, Neil Gorsuch). Ruckelshaus, who has led the push for salmon recovery and cleaning up Puget Sound, has been critical of Pruitt and the agency’s transparency. 

Pruitt’s entitled MO transcends party and is at least as old as the Machiavellian characters in Henry Adams’s Democracy and the Gilded Age abuses lampooned by the cartoonist Thomas Nast. It’s easy to caricature Pruitt as a 19th century lobbyist leering from the U.S. House Gallery in a “big coal” sash. Plus there were his customized fountain pens, the magoozling to land his wife a Chick-fil-A franchise, and, of course, a $25,000 “cone of silence” for soundproof phoning. Power really does corrupt.     

“It’s pretty clear that pollution is a feature of the position, and will likely remain through this administration,” said Mitch Friedman, the founder and longtime executive director of Conservation Northwest. “Whether corruption was a bug or a feature, time will tell.”

The battles are far from over. And now we won’t have Scott Pruitt to kick around anymore.

July 6, 2018 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

ICE agents and the ethics of following orders

In this photo provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, people who’ve been taken into custody related to cases of illegal entry into the United States, rest in one of the cages at a facility in McAllen, Texas, Sunday, June 17. (Photo by U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Rio Grande Valley Sector/via AP)

originally published on Crosscut.com on June 21, 2018

Angelina Godoy, who runs the University of Washington Center for Human Rights, had hit her nerve-jangled limit. Godoy had pestered lawmakers about the forced separation of asylum-seeking families. She had shared her own Central American research on the ripple effect of seizing children from their parents. But the needle seemed stuck.

So Godoy fashioned a cardboard sign that read, “ICE agents: Stop following orders,” and quietly stood vigil outside of the Seattle office tower where U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel file in to work.

She announced her intentions on Facebook, spurring a handful of supporters. Since then, a swath of moms, religious activists, retirees, and neophyte sign-wavers (including me) has gathered each weekday morning, greeting employees and passersby.

The messages are tailored to agents on their home turf. ICE: Stop locking up children.

It’s a visceral appeal to the women and men who are part of an agency required to enforce the Trump Administration’s zero-tolerance policy of separating children from their parents — something that may be close to ending under an executive order from the president but, even so, can’t be remedied immediately with more than 2,000 children being held without family around them. The Orwellian, gothic vocabulary — young children torn from their mothers and “caged” in “tender age” facilities — is chilling because it’s not a dystopian novel.

But the vigil’s subtext is radical, that ICE agents should stand down and engage in Thoreau-style civil disobedience. Easy for Thoreau, mind you, but less easy when your livelihood is at stake.

Appealing to front-line enforcers generally isn’t part of the political-change playbook. A republic has mechanisms to promulgate laws and influence policy. And, especially in times of crisis, ICE agents, like police and firefighters, are fundamental to public safety.

Godoy’s strategy freights ICE — federal workers who love their families and chafe at their household bills — with the moral burden. In the United States, the onus should be on the political class, specifically the president and members of Congress. So what to do when the president is a govern-by-Twitter authoritarian and Congress is paralyzed? Frustration propels activists to parrot the 18th century’s Edmund Burke, that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Fortunately, ICE employees swear allegiance to the U.S. Constitution. In philosophy parlance, they have moral agency. They can and should exercise judgment consistent with their own values and sense of the greater good. But that takes a special kind of courage. And nerve.

First, agents may object and refuse to participate, arguing that Trump’s policy of rounding up those seeking asylum violates the Fourteenth Amendment. No person, that includes non-citizens, may be deprived of life or liberty without due process of law.

ICE agents also can exercise their own First Amendment right to free expression. During off hours, ICE officers can join in protests without violating the Hatch Act, the 1939 law curtailing political activities of federal employees. And, of course, ICE agents may resign.

There are antecedents to each of these scenarios. There were the CIA field officers who pushed back on the agency’s post-9/11 “enhanced interrogation” program. There were the mass resignations at the U.S. State Department under Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, a pattern that has continued. And there was the moral credibility of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, which hastened the end of American involvement in Southeast Asia.

On Monday, I jumped the writer-advocate barrier, and joined Godoy and other friends. My sign, “consider your legacy,” was a wee milquetoast and didn’t tug like the others. But there was something invigorating about encountering those in the thicket, those agents with either averted or slow-burn eyes, dedicated to doing the right thing.

The jarring part is that it has come to this. Civil society breaks down when political norms and institutions begin to erode. The injustice and cruelty of Trump’s policy is a crucible for public servants, for all of us.

Disclosure: The writer serves on the advisory board for the UW Center for Human Rights.

June 21, 2018 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

A love story rooted in the unthinkable

originally published on Crosscut.com on February 13, 2018

Saccharine greeting cards, gut-binding chocolates. There’s a contrived feel to Valentine’s Day.

Instead, I picture a September walk with my wife, Laurie, as yellowing birch and maple signal autumn.

Laurie pauses and pulls on my bottom eyelid with her thumb, as if judging a dog show.

“Both of your eyes are yellow,” she says.

Laurie, jetlagged from a work trip to Zambia, has me checked in to the walk-in clinic within an hour. We brace for an assembly line of disinfectants, IV pokes, the sounds of ripping Velcro and mechanical bells, power-of-attorney directives and the check-here consent form all hypochondriacs dread. “Do you want to be revived?” Do I want to be revived?

I am healthy, I am semi-young, I am a vegetarian. A diagnosis of Stage 3, inoperable pancreatic cancer doesn’t square.

We receive the news, but I don’t make a morbid joke or reference Tolstoy’s “Death of Ivan Ilyich.” I’m fine discussing Ivan’s existential plight, mind you, I just don’t want to be Ivan. All I can do is think of Gene Hackman playing Little Bill Daggett in “Unforgiven.” “I don’t deserve this. To die like this.” Hackman says. “I was building a house.”

There are forty-eight hours of doughnut-tube scans, blood draws and an endoscopic procedure to insert a stent in my biliary tract. From the clinic to Swedish Hospital, the haze of bleak news begins to clear and to reveal a navigator: Laurie.

There she is, writing it all down. Everything. Computer-leering doctors and interns let loose a stream of acronyms, reassuring chatter about the week’s weather forecast mixed with an occasional You’re-gonna-die euphemism, as I fix on one word or one statement and blank out the rest.

Laurie answers all of the questions. She explains to the nurses that I’d like to be revived, thank you so much. No, we don’t have a written will. No, her husband hasn’t had any “falls.”

We should keep the diagnosis quiet, I tell Laurie. I’ll post on Facebook Dylan Thomas reading “Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night” a few times. Friends will clue in. No, she says, we’re telling everyone. And so we do.

Within days, I receive calls and emails from my old middle-school teachers, from pals I hadn’t seen since senior prom, even from parents and relatives of friends. We love you, they say. It’s a wave of peace and goodwill. Laurie and I are speechless. And emboldened.

Thanks to privilege, to Laurie’s insurance and to good fortune, we land the best oncologist on the West Coast, Dr. Andrew Coveler, at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. We opt for the full-fury chemo, to challenge the grim odds and perhaps qualify for an operation known as the “Whipple.”

Cancer world is a beast, cruelly democratic and unsparing. My infusion waiting area includes a child in a sun dress and a man who resembles an Old Testament prophet. We each wear a paper wrist band with a Safeway-style bar code. In her long essay, “On Being Ill,” Virginia Woolf writes about the poverty of language, hankering to convey the primitive otherworldliness of the sick and the dying. It’s visceral.

A port is surgically inserted below my collar bone. After a day of in-patient infusion, I get hitched to a take-home man-purse of chemo.

The man-purse clicks once a minute, like an underwater metronome. No click, no chemo. It shares our bed, and when it’s detached a couple of days later, we continue to hear the nightly clicks, like an auditory phantom limb.

Laurie also prepares for a potential chemo leak (I’m the spilled-milk, cartwheel-down-the-stairs sort.) In the closet sits a sealed bio-wipe bag with hazard-disposal instructions.

There’s infection followed by infection. Laurie takes my temperature and doles out Cipro. She shakes me awake to eat. We drive to the hospital, often at midnight or on a Sunday. She works fulltime, while still caring for me. And caring for me is fulltime.

My gall bladder ruptures, and doctors insert a drain. A week later, I walk from the bathroom in the dark. As I get back into bed, my toes fork the tube stretching from my torso to an IV sack, nicknamed “Mr. Bile Bag.” I scream.

Laurie rises and looks at me. “How did you manage that?” she says.

Laurie is okay with a James Madison colonial-era wig. She orders one. Friends visit us at home, and I sit in my recliner like a pasha, receiving guests. I don’t do a thing as Laurie fixes snacks, takes coats, cajoles, navigates.

“It’s bedtime,” Laurie says. “Go eat a piece of cheese cake.” I need to keep on the weight, which I do. She keeps me healthy enough to qualify for the Whipple. After the Whipple, there is more chemo, along with radiation, along with more Laurie.

So, my Valentine’s story is a love story. It begins with an unromantic scribbler who meets a romantic do-gooder. They fall in love and decide to marry, eschewing traditional wedding vows. In sickness and in health, for better or for worse? Bosh.

But people reveal themselves. Now I understand the “in sickness” crucible. Now I understand love.

February 13, 2018 phjackson Leave a response , ,

Can Trump really do that? UW profs look at presidential power

originally published on Crosscut.com on January 28, 2018

As the New York Times reports, President Donald Trump demanded last June that special counsel Robert Mueller — thick in the weeds of the Russia obstruction investigation — be given the heave-ho. According to the Times, White House Counsel Donald McGahn II said nay, that he would opt to resign rather than pass along Trump’s sack order to the Department of Justice. The president subsequently cooled down, and constitutional bedlam was averted.

In the private sphere, Trump’s “you’re fired” fiat would be unremarkable. But the latest news illustrates the limits of presidential power: There are executive-branch checks, and Trump must abide.

Responding to the post-election groundswell of interest in presidential authority, two University of Washington law professors, Kathryn Watts and Lisa Manheim — both former clerks to U.S. Supreme Court justices — have written an authoritative citizen’s guide: “The Limits of Presidential Power.” It’s a non-wonky, relevant and engaging primer, threaded with heavy-lift concepts such as the Administrative Procedure Act. And it also offers tangible examples like climate change, where the new administration has experienced the weight of local, state and judicial pushback.

And where better to examine the new normal of the executive branch than the Pacific Northwest? Washington state throws light on the limits of executive power — from litigating the travel ban, to challenging environmental rollbacks, to arguing against the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality repeal.

The West also gives expression to the curiosity of “states’ rights” as a progressive anthem, once code for 1960s’ racist pushback in the American South. Today it’s about building a “blue wall” against challenges to environmental, civil and immigrant rights. Liberals, it seems, suddenly adore the 10th Amendment.

We live in interesting times. At least in some minds, Trump may be the kind of hydra-headed executive James Madison had in mind when he warned in Federalist No. 51, “if men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

As Watts observes: “He’s just one piece of a very big governmental system and our legal system does not make him all-powerful. The people who founded our country were afraid of tyranny and they created a system that divided up power and purposely created friction between all of the different actors that would be sharing power, and friction in their mind is a sign of good government.”

Earlier this week, Crosscut sat down with co-author Kathryn Watts. Watts and Manheim also will appear at Folio on Thursday, Feb. 1. This is an edited version of the conversation.

I assume Donald Trump was the impetus for writing this. When did you decide to collaborate with your UW faculty colleague to produce this book and how long did it take you? 

Co-author

We started collaborating last winter. The impetus for writing it really flowed from the fact that, in the wake of the election, we had a lot of questions coming up from our law students and from many members of the public outside of the law school, from journalists across the country, from members of the community who had questions about presidential power. They started turning to the law school as a resource, wanting to learn more. One of the things we did at the law school in response was to put on a new course on executive power. I co-taught that course with my colleague Sanne Knudsen. That course filled to capacity with our own students, but we had lots of members of the public who asked, “Can’t I sit in?”

That made us realize that there was this hunger for more knowledge about the law outside of the law school building and outside of lawyers or lawyers-to-be. That’s when my colleague, Lisa Manheim, and I started talking about writing something like a crash course or a primer in the laws of presidential power for people who are not in law school, for people who are members of the public who want to better understand what the law allows and doesn’t allow a president to do, and what those laws mean for them as members of the public in terms of how they can be involved in government. It, however, is not a book about Trump. It is a book about presidential power more broadly.

A major takeaway of your book is embedded in its title, that the president really is limited in the scope of his powers. Of the various checks on Trump’s authority, which do you think has been most effective? 

It’s hard to pick one, but the courts have certainly played a very central role this past year. For example, President Trump’s first travel ban was challenged right away in court at the beginning of his presidency and the state of Washington took the lead in that case. That’s a prime example that splashed across the news right in the beginning of his administration, and it shows the power of the courts to be able to assess the legality of presidential action.

One of the book’s more sobering takeaways was on the difficulty of applying the 25th Amendment. It’s pretty exacting, isn’t it?

Yes, it is very exacting. In fact, it is quite telling that neither impeachment nor the 25th Amendment have ever been used to oust a president from office. Both provide separate mechanisms for ouster, and yet neither of them has ever successfully been used to remove a president from office because they are exacting.

So if you ask me, what is the most likely end to the Trump presidency, it’s either him being voted out of office or him being “timed out” of office, if he’s voted into another term. Because the procedures written into our Constitution involving impeachment and the 25th Amendment require so much to happen, and you’d need all sorts of political stars to align, removal via impeachment or the 25th Amendment is unlikely when judged from a purely historical perspective. We do have two presidents who were impeached by the House [Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton] but they then weren’t convicted by the Senate. Another option could be that the threat of either of those removal tools hanging over a president’s head could prompt resignation if some major controversy did erupt. We saw that — resignation — with Nixon.

What happens if Robert Mueller’s investigation turns up evidence of something criminal, of high crimes?

So, if the Mueller investigation turns up evidence of some high crimes and misdemeanors committed by President Trump himself, then the House can go ahead and impeach, but then the Senate has to convict before the president is ousted from office. And that whole impeachment process is totally separate from criminal proceedings. Congress is not the one that has the power to bring criminal proceedings against the president or others. So, impeachment is one political route and then you have the criminal process, which is a different route, and there are legal debates over whether a sitting president could be criminally indicted. Some legal scholars say, no, criminal proceedings would not be an option while Trump is in office, that impeachment is the only option for a sitting president, not criminal indictment.

Is it all “wait and see?” Presuppose Mueller comes out with a three-part finding, including conspiracy and obstruction of justice, but the the House, still in Republican hands, decides not to impeach. If Mueller wanted to go the criminal route, can he issue an indictment?

This would be uncharted territory. And that’s one of the things about presidential power that is interesting, but also can be quite frustrating: Our Constitution is fairly vague about so many different things, and it leaves many questions unanswered. Many legal scholars, though, would say that the main recourse would be through the political route, through impeachment.

Your book is civil and comprehensive — it’s not Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.” But, by most any assessment, this is no ordinary president. With the erosion of democratic norms, do you worry that the old rules no longer apply?  

The rule of law has definitely been challenged and called into question by this particular president. As somebody who believes deeply in the rule of law, that is troubling. So, for example: Tweets that call judges, like a judge sitting here in Seattle, a “so-called judge” — those are quite concerning from a rule-of-law perspective. Having said that, the president often then follows up with another tweet that says, “see you in court.” So, in the end, the rule of law and the system of law is being abided by to the extent that the president and those in his administration are following court orders. When they lose in the court, they are then proceeding to challenge it and appeal within the court system, so that is demonstrating that the judicial machinery and the legal machinery continue to operate and work.

In order to see that the rule of law holds up, you do have to have everybody paying attention, and you do have to have everybody participating.  That’s one of the main goals of our book: to try to help better empower interested people to know who can you hold accountable for what sorts of action, how can you ensure that power is checked so that no one actor — or no one governmental entity in our nation — becomes all-powerful? Because once you have too much accumulation of power in one individual’s hands, the rule of law could crumble. So we all need to be vigilant in terms of doing our own part and participating in government because democracies like ours ultimately are protected by and endure because of people — informed and participatory people.

January 28, 2018 phjackson Leave a response , ,

GOP tax bill could turn 7,000 UW grad students’ worlds upside down

originally published on Crosscut.com on November 21, 2017

The quickest way to slow the creation of troublesome intellectuals might be to tax them. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, H.R. 1, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives on Nov. 16, could do just that.

Tucked into the 450-page colossus of a bill is a teensy section that would make tuition waivers for graduate students count as taxable income. And with that, 7,000 University of Washington graduate students would have their worlds turned upside down.

It’s not at all clear if the change will take place. While the House measure included the change, the U.S. Senate Finance Committee passed its own version of tax overhaul last week. And the Senate version does not include the tuition-waiver tax.

There has been little or no public discussion of the House Republicans’ reasoning or any indication whether they would fight to include the tuition provision in negotiations with the Senate that would be needed to send a bill to President Donald Trump for signature. However, re-jiggering higher education has become a conservative touchstone. In the run-up to his 2016 bid for the Republican presidential nomination, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said that “we need a holistic overhaul” of higher ed. “Welders make more money than philosophers,” Rubio said.

Despite the lack of a Senate provision changing the treatment of tuition waivers, graduate students here and across the country are worried.

“It’s frustrating, and it makes me angry,” said Riddhi Mehta-Neugebauer, a fourth-year graduate student in the UW Department of Political Science. “The GOP decided to balance the budget on the backs of graduate students and the working class, while they do little to nothing about corporate tax loopholes and wealthy offshore tax havens.”

Mehta-Neugebauer moved to South King County after her Seattle rent was hiked $300. The House bill makes finishing the program, moving out of the working class, or even achieving the American dream (such as buying a home) even more difficult, she said.

Whether it’s the social sciences or the physical sciences, universities rely on grad students to teach a majority of their classes and conduct research, Mehta-Neugebauer said.

“It will lead the way to de-fund higher-education, and it will negatively impact research and innovation.” she said.

As partisans kvetch over the bill’s fallout — the Congressional Budget Office estimates it will goose the deficit by $1.7 trillion over 10 years — hidden threads are being teased out. The House bill, for example, puts the kibosh on student-loan interest deductions and ends a few tax-exempt bond options, which benefit large public universities such as the UW.

“When students lose out, it’s not only they who suffer, but all of us in Washington and beyond,” UW President Ana Mari Cauce wrote in a blog post last week, before the House vote.

There is also worry that the tax plan could jeopardize the pipeline of scholarship to the public and private sectors. Mehta-Neugebauer said, “The research we conduct is necessary to innovate policy agendas within the public sector and develop new technologies that provide companies a competitive edge.”

Samantha Dolan, a doctoral student in the UW’s Department of Global Health, said that the bill would have a significant impact on her living expenses. Dolan estimated that she would be paying taxes on roughly $30,000 per year.

“Depending on the tax rate, I may have to consider becoming a part-time student in order to have enough time for another job to supplement my income,” she said. “Many students at UW live off of part-time salaries or stipends that are only intended to cover monthly living expenses. Ph.D students at UW rely on incentives like tuition waivers in order to complete course work and focus on their research without having to take on full-time jobs.

“I would not have considered coming to UW if they had not provided a waiver.”

Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair at the UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, has called the tuition change “one of many wrong-headed elements of the House Republican tax proposal.”

In a message, he wrote, “In a nutshell, graduate research assistants currently receive a very modest stipend (roughly $2500 a month, $22,500 for 9 months at UW), and have their tuition forgiven or paid from a grant (currently roughly $16,500 for 9 months for an in-state student). The proposal is that the forgiven tuition would be treated (and taxed) as income. This makes no logical sense, and would really upset the applecart.”

The full Senate will likely vote right after the Thanksgiving holiday. Republicans hope to enact tax reform before the end of the year.

An article in a Vancouver-based publication, The Tyee, suggests that Canadian universities could be in a position to benefit by offering students — and even their professors —  a more welcoming home.  “For post-secondary education in the U.S., Trump’s tax bill amounts to a lobotomy with a railroad spike,” The Tyee’s Crawford Killian writes.

The outcome of congressional action might conceivably make the North look a bit warmer to young scholars.

November 21, 2017 phjackson Leave a response , ,

A new political group will target the forgotten voters

originally published on Crosscut.com on November 16, 2017

As things fall apart, to bastardize W.B. Yeats, two veteran lawmakers hope to rekindle the vital center in American politics.

Chris Vance, a former Republican state party chair and King County Council member, and former U.S. Rep. Brian Baird, a Democrat, announced on Thursday the launch of Washington Independents, a political action committee designed to provide the financing, tools and political training for independent candidates in Washington.

During his 2016 run against incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, Vance, once emblematic of the state’s Republican establishment, disavowed Donald Trump. For Vance, Trump’s election was a tectonic event. “The party changed, I didn’t change,” said Vance, who — after writing a number of pieces critical of the party in Crosscut and elsewhere — declared himself no longer a Republican in September.

Vance’s disavowal of Trump last year infuriated state Republican party chair Susan Hutchison and other conservative activists.

The independent effort has received $10,000 in seed funding from its national affiliate, the Centrist Project, along with a few thousand dollars from other donors, Vance said.

“The American people,” he said, “are hungry for an alternative to the status quo.”

After 12 years in Congress, Baird said, he had tired of the “extremes divided along more tribal lines and focused more on party power.”

Partisan ideology dams sensible-center policies flowing from both parties. It’s why surveys continue to show Congress in such low esteem, he said. The mission is to attract disaffected members of both parties.

Baird said he remains a Democrat, but tacks to the center.

“When Democrats lost their centrists, they lost the majority,” Baird said. “When Republicans lost centrists, they lost their mind.”

In an email, Caleb Heimlich, executive director of the Washington State Republican Party, wrote, “Republican candidates on the 2018 ballot will have demonstrated track records of fighting for their constituents, holding government accountable and investing in education. Voters care about preventing a state income tax, fixing car tabs, preserving water rights, getting traffic moving and balancing the budget without raising taxes. Parties help define these issues for voters which motivates them to vote for our candidates. While independent candidates may be sincere, they don’t have the power of a party behind them.”

State Democratic Chair Tina Podlodowski responded by email: “I’ll wait to see what the group actually does before commenting further on it, but I’m not inspired by the people they hold up as examples of their ‘centrist voices’ like Dave Reichert, Jeff Flake, and Slade Gorton. Seems a little too white, a little too male, and a little too Republican to be called ‘independent.’ ”

Asked about the independent effort, longtime Northwest pollster Stuart Elway said that he’s become skeptical of individual centrists. “There is a political center, but it is more like an equilibrium, and it varies by issue,” he said.

Elway, whose statewide poll released this month highlighted partisan and urban-rural divides, helped run John Anderson’s 1980 presidential campaign in Washington. He said he understands Washington Independents’ “fulcrum” strategy, where a handful of independents tip the balance and forge consensus in a polarized, two-party state legislature or the U.S. Congress.

“There is an opening for a meeting in the middle,” Elway said.

For now, the group plans to target areas of the state where one party is predominant. In a single-party scenario, an independent is more likely to survive a primary. This creates a platform for a non-ideologue who contours to what Washington Independents term “the culture of Washington state,” such as fiscal responsibility, a pro-free trade agenda and a progressive angle on social and environmental issues.

Vance and Baird said there won’t be a litmus test for candidates. It’s an open approach, which also illustrates the challenge of defining a centrist.

While sympathetic, Elway remained unconvinced. “A centrist,” Elway said, “is a construct, not a human being.”

November 16, 2017 phjackson Leave a response , ,

Tools for the Trump resistance

originally published on Crosscut.com on January 19, 2017

On Inauguration Day, the sun will rise and set even for #NeverTrump residents of the Northwest. Hopefully. And sometime Saturday, workers at Seattle’s Second Avenue federal building will remove and archive portraits of President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. Apply for a travel visa or stop for a visit at the offices of Sen. Patty Murray or Maria Cantwell, and you will be greeted by the beaming mugs of Donald J. Trump and Mike Pence.

Many people are saying it will be great.

In the Puget Sound area and urban parts of the Northwest, however, Trump anxiety transcends partisan politics. For many, conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks’ judgment that the American people just “crowned a fool king” will resonate.

In Washington, both Republican U.S. Senate candidate Chris Vance and gubernatorial nominee Bill Bryant distanced themselves from Trump and his racist babble. Vance has continued to do so, while Democrats pledge to resist the policies Trump espoused with impulsive rhetoric on the campaign trail.

“No matter what happens in that Washington, here in this Washington, we will not forget who we are,” Gov. Jay Inslee said in his State of the State address. It’s a refrain that will find its way into Democratic talking points from Everett to Yakima.

To compound the unreality of a Trump presidency, Republicans are freighted with a national agenda that weathervanes, requiring the political class to pretzel like contortionists. Do Republicans embrace free trade or are they protectionists? Do childhood vaccines trigger autism and is climate change a lefty myth? Are Germany and NATO the bad guys and the Russians our pals?

The Alice in Wonderland reversal in American foreign policy is especially chilling. As human rights leader and former chess champion Garry Kasparov wrote in a Jan. 15 tweet, “I’m still waiting for Trump to say something about global affairs that hasn’t literally been said first by the Kremlin.”

So what’s the best tool for Trump resisters? Satire is one strategy — an approach that clearly enrages Trump, who has tweeted more about Alec Baldwin and “Saturday Night Live” than universal human rights.

“I am not sure sophisticated satire or wit can do anything besides amuse people who already agree with it in the first place,” says Bill Oakley of Portland, an Emmy-winning former producer and writer for “The Simpsons.”

“However, ruthless mocking in a very simplified form can indeed work wonders as was proven throughout history,” Oakley says. “Witness the story of Boss Tweed [a corrupt 19th century politician] who didn’t care at all about newspaper editorials but was infuriated to no end by ‘those damn pictures’ drawn by cartoonist Thomas Nast.” He points out that Tweed was eventually arrested overseas because someone recognized him from a Nast cartoon.

Oakley already has a head start, lampooning Trump’s nominee for education secretary in a recent tweet: “ ‘How can you have a school without a gun? What if a bear came through the door?’ ” – Betsy DeVos is channeling Grampa Simpson.”

Northwesterners are seasoned resister-activists. On Sunday, a capacity crowd filled Seattle’s Town Hall to mark “Writers Resist,” a national effort to mobilize writers to advance free speech and challenge Trumpism. One standout was Tod Marshall, the Washington State Poet Laureate, who read William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming.” The stanzas haunt, especially the oft-quoted, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”

If only Trump, who plans to put the kibosh on arts funding, felt threatened by poetry.

From Suffragists (Washington women got the vote a decade before the passage of the 19th Amendment) to abolishing the death penalty (it happened first in 1913), Washingtonians know how to agitate for change. (As Knute Berger writes, however, Northwesterners also have flirted with fascism. It’s a legacy expressed in the militia movement and other extremist offshoots, documented by David Neiwert in his books “In God’s Country” and “Hell Followed with Her.”)

Washingtonians have multiple options to express resistance, from Inauguration Day protests to Saturday’s Womxn’s march, which is expected to draw 50,000 protestors.

Over the long term, volunteers can become active or contribute to the Washington ACLU, the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, or local organizations inspired by the “indivisibles” campaign to challenge the Trump agenda. Nonpartisans can support impartial worker rights or human rights scholarships at the University of Washington’s Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies or the Center for Human Rights (disclosure: I serve on its advisory board).

Ultimately, what may sink a Trump administration is impunity, just as when Eliot Ness targeted Al Capone’s taxes. Americans will soon learn more than they ever wanted to know about the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution and the previously obscure Logan Act on private citizens staying out of foreign affairs, which members of the incoming administration may have violated multiple times.

This is the acid test of a republic: Are we a nation of laws or will we allow impunity to erode America’s democratic institutions?

“If anyone in the audience is asking what can I do, I say that we are going back to the 1960s, the American people need to get off the couch and organize, push back, press Congress, no matter if the issue is immigration, civil rights or anything else,” said former U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott at a Jan. 17 UW lecture. “You have to be willing to go beyond the easy stuff, and get out there.”

So jettison the easy stuff. No amount of craft beer, hand-wringing, or righteous Facebook posts can unmake what’s been made. Resisting Trump, the consummate bully and narcissist, will take time and sweat equity.

January 19, 2017 phjackson Leave a response , ,

Best of 2016: Everett is Trump’s kind of town

originally published on Crosscut.com on August 28, 2016

In 2004, Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, rallied a crowd of mostly white, working class supporters at what is now Everett’s Xfinity Arena. Kerry slipped off his suitcoat, and gestured at the audience. “I’m telling you, folks,” he said. “You can’t believe that Republican folderol.”

A union activist in a Mariners cap craned his neck. “Anybody got a dictionary?”

On Tuesday, Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, will rally a crowd of (most likely) white, working-class supporters at Xfinity Arena. Chances are Trump’s “f” words won’t require a dictionary.

With Everett, local Trump troops wisely picked a community estranged from the Northwest’s Amazon-fueled gold rush. With surrounding Arlington, Sultan and Granite Falls, it’s a restive corner of Western Washington where Trump’s “tell it like it is” message, however freighted by scapegoating and code-word racism, finds a receptive audience.

“I compare Everett to a wind tunnel,” said Democratic Snohomish County Councilmember Brian Sullivan, who represents a district that includes the city. “Economic growth is going on all around it, just not in it.”

It’s easy to crystal-ball Tuesday’s memes. Trump will mention “China taking Boeing jobs” four or five times. He’ll point to the “giveaway disaster” of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and, likely, the Export-Import Bank. There’s a Navy here, we’re going to use our Navy to obliterate ISIS. No ISIS! And he’ll mention timber, “we’ll bring that back,” and returning federal public lands to the states. All those old jobs, “they’re coming back, folks.”

Everett has cause to beware billionaires bearing gifts. The city, carved from indigenous lands, was bankrolled by John D. Rockefeller, the world’s first billionaire. Once Rockefeller determined that his investment was tanking, he turned tail and abandoned his holdings. (Irony alert: The city still honors John D. with a Rockefeller Avenue).

While most associate Everett, the county seat, with all-things Boeing, the vast majority of Boeing employees don’t live in town. And the last mill in Milltown, Kimberly-Clark, shuttered in 2012.

The city of 103,000 also has a discouragingly low home ownership rate of 44 percent. As the Everett Herald’s Jim Davis writes, it’s not only the lowest in the county, but also the lowest among the top 20 largest cities in Washington (ditto for median household income—Everett rests at the bottom).

The economic malaise magnifies social ills. Abuse of painkillers and heroin is epidemic, a pattern documented in July by the Los Angeles Times.

Trump, nevertheless, is kryptonite to many local Republicans. Even his Washington campaign co-chair, State Sen. Don Benton, irks longtime activists. As party chair in 2000, Benton famously was accused by fellow Republicans of having sat on thousands of dollars, which could have been spent on the re-election campaign of Sen. Slade Gorton, who was defeated by Democrat Maria Cantwell by a 1,953 vote margin.

County Councilmember Ken Klein, a rising political star and the only Republican member of the five-member council, said in a message, “I will not be commenting on Mr. Trump’s visit.”

Others Republicans are more direct about the prospect of systemic, long-term damage to their party.

“Despite the hopes of beleaguered Republicans that Trump’s recent campaign shake-up was a pivot toward a smarter campaign, a visit to Everett looks like more of the same,” said Bryan Myrick, publisher and writer at the conservative NW Daily Marker. “The damage to down-ballot Republicans is going to be real and the upside for his campaign is impossible to see, since all available polling shows him down in Washington by double digits.

“What’s more after a week when he began to reset a new conversation on racial issues — albeit in his typical ‘bull in a china shop’ fashion — he’s chosen once again to avoid bringing his message directly to minority communities only minutes down I-5 from Everett in favor of hosting another firebrand rally to what will likely be a predominantly white crowd.”

Reached while on vacation, Snohomish County Democratic Party Chair Richard Wright echoed Myrick’s message.

“I’m surprised that Donald Trump would visit here and risk further damaging the GOP’s chances in the state,” he said. “His vitriol and hate speech is not a winning strategy here. It may play to a very select few, but Snohomish County is a place of diversity where the majority of us will not tolerate his message.”

When Trump stands at the Xfinity dais, he can face West where, overlooking Port Gardner, sits the unfinished Potala Place project, a mixed-use development cobbled by an overpromising, out-of-town real estate developer, Lobsang Dargey. It’s now in receivership, after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued Dargey for fraud. Trump also could look East in the direction of Monte Cristo, where his grandfather, Friedrich, may or may not have run an area prostitution parlor.

Or he could just look a few blocks down Hewitt and imagine Everett’s old Orpheum Theater, where labor and political radical Mother Jones and Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs drew large crowds. They, too, engaged in a utopian, system-is-rigged banter, although they never managed to get as close as Trump to the levers of executive power.

Billionaires bearing gifts. We’ve seen his like before.

December 30, 2016 phjackson Leave a response , ,