A bit over a year ago, I wrote an article on Utopia. 2016 was the 500th anniversary of Thomas More’s original Utopia, and it seemed like a good time to reclaim both the name and the concept of Utopia. At the time, I confidently announced that I was taking on Utopia as a project. That I wanted to provide both a definition and a path toward a Utopia that, 500 years later, would seem … Utopian.
Frankly, when I made that statement I expected to spend this year arguing over whether we were raising the minimum wage fast enough. Whether we should be fighting to lower the age qualification for Medicare, or pressing for a public option in the ACA. I was looking forward to seeing the United States go beyond the Paris agreement, walking back from the edge in company with the rest of the world.
Instead, we’re here. So, instead of looking at the 500 years since Utopia, I want to celebrate another quincentennial. In 1517, a professor of moral theology nailed a set of 95 theses to the door of the All Saints' Church in Wittenburg, Germany. Those propositions directly challenged the authority of the wealthiest and most powerful organization in Europe at the time, one that combined the reach of both church and state, with a giant corporation grafted on the side. That little pamphlet that Martin Luther published in 1517 went a long way to wrecking that arrangement on every level.
So … it’s Sunday morning, and we’ve spent the week looking at images from Germany. What say we nail up a few theses?
- The Electoral college has outlived its usefulness and now acts only to deprive citizens of the value of their votes. It must be retired and replaced by direct election.
- Healthcare is a human right that should be available to anyone, including non-citizens, through a universal, well-regulated system funded by taxes and available without direct charge.
- Education is a human right that should be available to anyone, including non-citizens, through public schools, colleges, and universities funded by taxes and available without direct charge.
- A living salary should be paid to every adult in the United States, regardless of their education or employment, regardless of ability or disability, regardless of whether they are actively seeking work or sitting on their ass.
- The use of force by agents of the government, including local and state police, should follow a single, fixed set of rules, violation of which subjects the violator to federal prosecution.
- Advertisements and active campaigning should be limited to a 90 day period in advance of any primary or election. An equal amount of air time and column inches are to be made available to all candidates within that period.
- No corporation, or any other entity outside of an individual human being, should be able to donate to, support, or work with any campaign. Human beings are allowed to donate up to $1000 to candidates. Total. Across all races.
- No one can pass a law constraining what you can do with or to your own body. That includes abortion, drugs, suicide, and dancing in public.
- Tax rates should be no less steeply progressive than they were in 1960, with rates rapidly approaching 100 percent above $10 m income.
- Anyone willing to work to repair trails, shelters, lodges, (but not parking lots) at national or state park gets a 50 percent boost in that living wage.
- Every American is registered to vote on turning 18.
Now, granted, that’s just 11. Which may make it seem like I’m 80-some theses short. But really, everything Luther says is: No human being can forgive sins, nobody knows a damn thing about purgatory, and indulgences are a rip-off. The rest is just variations on a theme.
Besides, I wanted to leave some room for your theses. Which you can add … right after you read these pundits.
Frank Bruni asks why Trump, and Trump surrogates, keep making the same ‘omission’
hen something happens once, it’s a curiosity. Twice, it’s a coincidence.
Three times or more, it’s a pattern.
And Donald Trump has established a pattern of offending — or at the very least ignoring — Jews. The most recent example was just last week, when he declined to pay his respects at a Holocaust memorial in Warsaw that other American presidents routinely visited.
It’s an issue that goes beyond Trump, though Trump is certainly a consistent offender. But then, Louisiana Republican Clay Higgins managed to record a political commercial at Auschwitz, and still not mention Jews.
[Trump had] been in office just a week when International Holocaust Remembrance Day rolled round and his administration issued a statement that bizarrely omitted any specific mention of Jews. Administration officials made no apology, saying that millions of people who weren’t Jewish died in the Holocaust and that by not singling out any one group of victims, the White House had taken a more “inclusive” approach.
But Trump went to Israel! And scouted some great spots to scam people out of condos he’ll never build.
Anne Applebaum says we’ve already reached a post-national world … it’s oligarchs, all the way down
A nearly empty room. A blank slate. The Russian-American relationship, which has always been atypical, has now become strange, even surreal. It is not even predictable, in the way that most diplomatic relationships are usually more or less predictable, because it is not driven by the geopolitical or economic interests of either Russians or Americans. It is driven, rather, by the personal interests of the two main players.
Doing the best thing for their respective nations isn’t remotely on the mind of either of these guys.
The actual agreements reached were underwhelming: an open channel of communication on Ukraine, whatever that means; a cease-fire in part of Syria, which could be hopeful but has been tried before; some new ambassadors. Far more important, as I say, were the personal stakes — and Russian President Vladimir Putin got most of what he wanted out of the meeting in the first few seconds. Outplaying President Trump at his own silly game, he waited for the American to offer his hand. Cameras clicked and flashed; minutes later, Russian websites had the photograph — a picture of Trump holding out his hand to a haughty Putin — on their home pages.
We still don’t know everything that was said in that two hour meeting, but you can bet Melania didn’t come running in halfway through because she was afraid Donald was going to miss the general session on the environment.
Kathleen Parker on Trump lobbing intercontinental ballistic blather back into the United States
Many American journalists and others correctly objected to President Trump’s lambasting of the U.S. media in his news conference Thursday in Poland, noting that his words were damaging to our international status and democracies around the world.
But Parker draws an equivalence between US media failing to cheer for Trump, and Trump delivering spit bombs from abroad.
I don’t mean to suggest we scribes and pundits should have been a cheering squad, something Trump seemed to have taken with him to Warsaw. But it’s important to fairly consider why journalists are in such disfavor among a majority of Americans. Is Trump’s aggressiveness toward the media, to some extent, earned? He’s not the first president to dislike the Fourth Estate, but he may be the president most disliked by the media since Richard Nixon.
Only, no. The president attacking the whole concept of a free press while sharing a stage with a fellow autocrat who has been vigorously making the same attacks is not the same as providing negative coverage of that president’s comments. Not even close.
Elizabeth Holtzman ponders whether Trump can forgive Trump
Can President Trump pardon himself? Can he pardon his close associates and family members? …
The Constitution’s pardon provision gives the president the power “to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.” Some argue that because the language is broad and there is no explicit prohibition, presidents may pardon themselves.
I suppose I’m one of those somebodies. It seems clear that the authors of the Constitution deliberately gave the president a get out of prosecution free card, under the theory that there’s always some portion of the justice system available to political opposition.
But this is simplistic and specious. Presidential self-pardoning would violate the basic structure of our Constitution, and the whole history of the pardon power strongly weighs against the concept.
Presidential power to pardon, including the impeachment exception, is directly modeled on the pardon power of the British monarch. Royal self-pardoning was inconceivable under the British system. Because British monarchs could commit no crime, they had no need to pardon themselves. Self-pardoning, therefore, was never part of the British pardon power — and was not incorporated into the U.S. version. There is no evidence the Constitution’s framers ever contemplated or supported a presidential self-pardoning power, as the debates during the constitutional convention make clear.
Hang on. I’m writing a new thesis … Okay. It says I’m right. Seriously, I think “the king couldn’t be prosecuted so the Constitution doesn’t let the president pardon himself” is a very silly argument.
David Ignatius on who “won” Trump Putin 1.0
For Trump, the meeting marked the fulfillment of a controversial promise he made early in the 2016 campaign to seek an improvement in relations with Moscow. Trump may claim a “win,” but the greater beneficiary is probably Putin, who seized this opportunity to “come in from the cold” after the sanctions and diplomatic isolation that followed Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea.
Trump bought the Syria deal at relatively low cost. Sanctions against Russia remain in place; the Russian diplomatic compounds that were seized Dec. 29 haven’t been returned. It was widely suspected that Trump’s advisers had discussed a removal of sanctions after he won the presidency; if any such agreement exists, it hasn’t been disclosed.
That seems like some super-size presumptions there. My position is that I don’t know if Trump or Putin “won,” but I’m pretty sure that the rest of us lost.
John Podesta is just as confused as everyone else — except Trump
Weaving through the mountains on a cross-country road trip with my wife, I was quite surprised to discover that — at least according to President Trump — I am the talk of the Group of 20 meeting. …
I’ve been at my share of global summits, so I sort of doubt that. The world leaders certainly have more important topics to grapple with. To take one issue close to my heart: how to deal with the challenge of climate change now that the president has declared that the United States will be withdrawing from the Paris climate accord. Or how to deal with the leadership vacuum now that Trump has turned his back on our traditional allies in Europe and Asia.
Trying to make sense of Trump is much harder than making sense of Russian motivations.
What I do know is this, which is why I’m choosing to respond to Trump’s tweet: The Russians stole my emails. When they did that, they committed a crime. They also invaded my privacy, and the privacy of a multitude of friends, family and colleagues with whom I communicated. That, combined with vicious lies spread by the alt-right media such as the so-called Comet Ping Pong conspiracy, exposed them to potential harm, as was evidenced by the shooting at Comet. The crime the Russians committed, as the intelligence community has concluded, was for the purpose of helping Trump get elected president.
And then Donald Trump received that stolen property and used it to his advantage. Which is also a crime.
The New York Times on a genuine threat to the 2018 election, not Trump’s imaginary voters.
Can the system be strengthened against cyberattacks in time for the 2018 midterms and the 2020 presidential race? The answer, encouragingly, is that there are concrete steps state and local governments can take right now to improve the security and integrity of their elections. A new study by the Brennan Center for Justice identifies two critical pieces of election infrastructure — aging voting machines and voter registration databases relying on outdated software — that present appealing targets for hackers and yet can be shored up at a reasonable cost.
You can pretty much bet that not only will the Republicans take none of these steps, they’ll use this report as a guide to how they can make things worse.
Donna Edwards makes a personal plea
After my loss in the April 2016 Senate primary, I wasn’t just disappointed, I was exhausted. During the recess that May, I decided to spend a week relaxing in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The beach was beautiful, but it did not cure my exhaustion. One day, on an early-morning run, my legs felt like spaghetti. Assuming I had a pinched nerve or stretched tendon, I decided to see my doctor on my return. Still, I went to work and kept up my schedule; after all, we had votes in the House on Monday. ...
I finally got my diagnosis after nearly two months of tests and analysis. It came June 22, 2016 — the day of the House sit-in in support of gun-control legislation.
That morning, I went to the House floor to join the sit-in. But hours into our protest, the House attending physician called me to his office to tell me I had multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease that attacks the central nervous system. At first, I couldn’t process what he was saying. I thought I had a pinched nerve; I didn’t know anything about MS. Devastated, I blinked away my tears and went back to the chamber, where I stayed for the remainder of the evening.
It’s not just the disease that Edwards shares with hundreds of thousands of others.
A year later, I am no longer in Congress, and my future health care is uncertain. I am not employed, and I pay $800 a month for my COBRA coverage, which ends in June 2018. I’m not sure what I’ll do then. My medication, which has thankfully halted the progression of my MS, costs roughly $73,000 a year. I’ve had three sets of MRI scans and will require one each year to check my progress; that’s roughly $7,000 each.
Carl Reiner reaches out to provide job advice to a young American
Dear Justice Anthony Kennedy,
I would like to start with congratulatory wishes on your forthcoming 81st birthday.
As someone who has almost a decade and a half on you, I can tell you this: It may well be that the best part of your career has just begun. As a nonagenarian who has just completed the most prolific, productive five years of my life, I feel it incumbent upon me to urge a hearty octogenarian such as yourself not to put your feet up on the ottoman just yet. You have important and fulfilling work ahead of you.
That’s advice all of us should take. But I’m really hoping Kennedy is listening.