Happy Anniversary Republican House, Senate, and Presidency

We’ve been treated to a year of chaos. Immigration roundups by masked men in the streets, trade disruption, and corruption unseen in American political history. The tariff regime, a brainchild of a president who does not understand economics, is undercutting American farmers and small businesses, let alone imposing a tax on hardworking Americans who now face the economic uncertainties of a world fraught with the perils of artificial intelligence coming to eat their jobs. Tariffs are inflationary. Ninety-nine percent of economists have said so. But Trump does not agree.

Let’s go on. A government shutdown causing mass flight delays and flight controllers calling in sick because they are not being paid. Thousands of government employees laid off. The House and Senate are now the Circumlocution Bureau, each passing responsibility to the other and refusing to do their job. Mike Johnson, the worst Speaker of the House in history—the most lickspittle—has closed down the House so they do not have to vote on health care subsidies and tax credits, effectively depriving people of accessible health care. And they have not funded SNAP payments and food stamps so poor people can go hungry. This bothers members of Congress not a bit, since they have their parking spaces at National Airport, their superior health care benefits, their staffs, and so they can do nothing for people who will go hungry. Let them eat cake. Donald Trump can use his wealthy donors to tear down the East Wing of the White House and build a golden ballroom. No chance for corruption there, eh? After all, these donors have government contracts based upon merit, no?

And what about Trump’s vacillating support for brave Ukrainians who are fighting a Russian dictator, killing thousands of Russian troops to stop aggression threatening all of Europe? We have seen this play out in 1939. Putin must be stopped. And NATO will eventually have to send troops into Ukraine, although no one in the West, least of all Trump, recognizes it. We need an FDR, not a DJT.

Federal workers, who live from paycheck to paycheck, are unable to put food on the table for their families, or pay their mortgages and car payments, or afford health care.

But wait. Elon Musk will become the first trillionaire. There is something obscene about that. What can one individual do to improve his lifestyle with one trillion rather than four hundred billion? This Dickensian dystopia did not exist even in the great writers’ cynical expressions of it. Trump has brought us Oliver Twist on steroids. Hungry children cannot get food stamps, but Musk gets a trillion?

The acquiescent Supreme Court expanded the power of a madman and will soon rule on his tariff agenda. The oral argument questions have the pundits predicting that they will strike down the destructive tariffs, but oral arguments are often deceptive. Long experience in the law has told me that. One cannot escape the ability of judges to craft decisions to their dispositions, despite Amy Coney Barrett’s new book artfully telling the tale of impartiality and respect for precedent. We’ve heard it all before, including mendacious confirmation-hearing songs and dances—from Barrett, from Kavanaugh, from Gorsuch, and from Alito. Liars all. It must be Alito’s wife’s fault—he being a scholar of sixteenth-century English jurisprudence as a rationale in his opinion in Dobbs, creating a mishmash of abortion rights in the overruling of Roe v. Wade and a half-century of judicial precedent.

In a revolt against the establishment, New York City has elected a mayor of electric campaign imagination, yet dubious qualifications to govern. We’ll see how far he can get with his government grocery stores, rent-frozen apartments, free buses, and higher taxes on small businesses. Let’s see how all those progressive young Jews and older leftists who voted for this anti-Zionist mayor fare. Let’s see how he manages the most Jewish city in America. Let’s see how he gets along with the Hasidim in Brooklyn. They are not Mets fans. They are Talmud fans. They are Zionists. And, by the way, they tried all that socialist nonsense. It was called the Soviet Union.

Judging from the Democratic victories this past week, voters seem to be waking up. Trump’s promise to bring inflation down, to lower the cost of living, to make life more affordable, has not come true. Democratic messaging on affordability is hitting its mark, aided by the reality of lost jobs, soaring grocery prices, and the distractions of masked ICE agents in the streets arresting schoolteachers and people with dark skin.

Somehow in this great land the sun is shining,
Somewhere the land is green,
Somewhere the path shall beckon;
But we know not when ’twill be seen.

The Democrats have failed us, the Republicans too.
Socialists will not help us,
We know that so well;
But in this land transformation shall brew.
We know from time to time
Someone, somehow arises
To bear the burden for us,
But we know not when.

When it all seems so hopeless,
It might be then.