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.)

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.

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? 

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.

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.”

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.