Isaac Laquedem

The White House conquers a once-proud law firm

Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, a prominent New York law firm, gave in to President Trump's sanctions today.  As part of its surrender, the firm agreed to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion from its hiring practices, and to provide $40 million of free legal work to civic causes favored by the Trump Administration.

The concession of Paul, Weiss to White House pressure comes just two months after the president revoked John Kennedy's executive order that prohibited federal contractors from discriminating in hiring.  It's especially poignant when set next to the Statement of Firm Principles that its managing partner Simon H. Rifkind laid out in 1963, in a masterful essay that the firm posts on its website to this day (it may still be there next week . . . maybe). 

Judge Rifkind wrote, “We believe in maintaining, by affirmative efforts, a membership of partners and associates reflecting a wide variety of religious, political, ethnic and social backgrounds, characteristic of that community.”  Judge Rifkind also wrote: “We refuse to be deterred by the unpopularity of a client or his cause from accepting a matter which justice and professional responsibility prompt us to take. *** Finally, we are committed to achieving our objectives without wearing any client's collar or any political party's livery.”  

I would like to believe that if Simon Rifkind were to walk into the office of his old firm today he would tear into the current management and then rip his name from the door.

 

This Key question from 1814 has a different meaning today

Fifteen years ago I wrote this short essay about how unusual our national anthem is when compared to those of other nations.  Instead of offering pious hopes for our leaders (Great Britain) or warning citizens of the bloodthirsty armies of the enemy (France), it mostly asks and answers a single question: last night our flag was flying over Fort McHenry.  Did the British army capture the fort, or is the flag still flying this morning?

Francis Scott Key wrote the words to "The Star-Spangled Banner" in 1814, though we didn't adopt the song as our anthem until 1931.  At the end of this first verse he phrased the question thusly:  "O say, does our star-spangled banner yet wave / O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?"

His words take for granted that the land below the flag is the "land of the free and the home of the brave."  Isaac hears the last couplet differently today.  Perhaps you do too.  Instead of asking whether the flag is still flying, the anthem now questions whether the land below the flag is still the land of the free and the home of the brave.  The Trump administration's slide from antics to autocracy suggests that it is not.

This song from 50 years ago is strangely relevant today

Robert Lamm's 50-year-old call to Harry Truman to rescue the nation resonates again today.  Mr. Truman, three years deceased, didn't answer.  Now would be a good time for him to break his silence or propose a successor.

"Comedian" Tony Hinchcliffe is Donald Trump's modern-day Samuel D. Burchard. Oopsie!

The 1884 presidential contest between James G. Blaine (the Republican nominee) and Grover Cleveland (the Democratic nominee) came down to the wire.  The polls (such as they were then) placed Blaine slightly ahead, and most observers expected that Blaine would defeat Cleveland and become the president in 1885.

Then, 140 years ago yesterday, six days before Election Day, a delegation of local clergymen met with Senator Blaine at the Fifth Avenue Hotel.  The chairman, the Reverend Samuel D. Burchard, included these three sentences in his welcome remarks:

"We have a higher expectation, which is that you will be the President of the United States, and that you will do honor to our name, to the United States and to the high office you will occupy.  We are Republicans and don't propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been Rum, Romanism and Rebellion.  We are loyal to our flag, we are loyal to you." 

"Rum" meant alcohol, on which attitudes crossed party lines.  "Rebellion" meant the late Civil War, when Republicans stood for the union and Democrats for secession and slavery.  "Romanism," however, meant the Roman Catholic church, which the Protestant ministers opposed on theological grounds and Blaine opposed on political grounds.  (In 1875 Blaine had proposed a constitutional amendment to prohibit all government aid to religious institutions, which for him meant mainly Catholic schools.)

Blaine heard Dr. Burchard call the Democratic Party the party of "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion," and did not dissent.  The national Democratic campaign committee and some of the state Democratic committees printed signs with Dr. Burchard's remarks to swing Catholic votes from the Republican candidate to the Democratic candidate.  "Here's what Blaine thinks of you," the signs implied, "so vote for his opponent."

I should add that in 1884 Catholicism was New York City's largest religious denomination.

Cleveland defeated Blaine by 23,000 votes nationwide and by a scant 1,149 votes in New York State.  He received 219 electoral votes to Blaine's 182.  If 575 New Yorkers had voted for Blaine instead of for Cleveland, Blaine would have won the state and its 36 electoral votes, and would have defeated Cleveland in the Electoral College, 218 to 183. 

On October 27, 2024 at a rally for republican candidate Donald Trump, almost exactly 140 years to the day after Dr. Burchard torpedoed the Blaine campaign, a speaker named Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico "a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean,"  Several of his other attempts at humor were based on racist or religious tropes.  Mr. Trump heard Mr. Hinchcliffe's remarks and said nothing about them in his own speech shortly afterward.

Tony Hinchcliffe has given Donald Trump a modern "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion" moment.  Residents of Puerto Rico are citizens of the United States, but they don't vote in the general presidential election  . . . until they move to one of the states, where as citizens they are immediately eligible to register to vote.  Over 200,000 Puerto Ricans moved to the United States after President Trump and FEMA botched the response to Hurricane Maria in 2017, including a large contingent to Pennsylvania, one of the swing states in 2024.  It would be a delicious irony if President Trump's mishandling of Hurricane Maria has combined with his modern-day Burchard moment to switch just enough Puerto Rican voters in Pennsylvania to give the state, and likely the national election, to Kamala Harris.

Isaac riffs on how the 25th Amendment will affect a second Trump administration

    Mr. Trump's increasingly disjointed public appearances have made it evident that he doesn't have the mental capacity to make it through a full term in office - maybe not even the first year. That of course raises the question of the 25th Amendment, which in turn leads to a political dilemma for Solons of both parties. Let's suppose that he and Senator Vance are elected, and that some time later Vice President Vance (as he would then be) and a majority of the Cabinet inform Congress that the President can't perform his duties.

 

    That's fine, if President Trump (as he would then be) agrees . . . but if he doesn't agree, and notifies Congress that he believes himself to be fit to serve, then Congress must vote, and he would return to power unless two-thirds of the House and two-thirds of the Senate vote that he is in fact incapacitated and unable to serve. Neither party will hold two-thirds of the seats in either chamber, meaning that Mr. Trump would return to the presidency unless Democrats join with republicans to oust him . . . in favor of J.D. Vance.

 

    Will the republicans, up to now mostly servile, vote to eject Donald Trump from the presidency and risk the anger of their base? And will the Democrats vote to eject him, knowing that J.D. Vance will then lead the nation? The senators and representatives of both parties will have no correct answer.

 

    The situation gets more complicated if Mr. Trump should resign or die in office. Vice President Vance will become the president, and the Speaker of the House will be next in line for the presidency until President Vance nominates a new vice president and a majority of both houses approve his choice. Imagine that the Democrats flip the House and choose (say) Hakeem Jeffries as the speaker. Would the Democrats, still remembering the non-hearing of Merrick Garland, be willing to vote down any nominee and keep the Veep position vacant? I think that turnabout would be fair play, and would enjoy watching the Senate republicans rage that the House is refusing to hold a hearing on a presidential nominee.

Lament for Kevin McCarthy

Kevin McCarthy's nearly nine months in office (a full term in other contexts) deserves a ballad to commemorate his service.  Isaac has written one.

 

 

Lament for Kevin McCarthy

(to the tune of “Whatever Became of Hubert?” by Tom Lehrer)
Words by Isaac Laquedem (2023)

Whatever became of Kevin?
Does anyone even know?
Once he mastered the floor, then they showed him the door
When four of his core voted “no.”

It required fifteen rounds to elect him
And only one vote to eject him.
Watch Gaetz and his pals playing games
As the GOP throws out more names

We must amend the rules, ex-Speaker
Says each Fox News reporter
Your successor’s going to be even weaker
And serve a term even shorter.

Whatever became of you, Kevin?
Do you miss being at the top?
Can you keep a straight face
When erased from your place
While you wait for Matt Gaetz
To flop?

Does McConnell look down from the Senate with glee
And gloat to his friends that “it’s NMFP”?
Do you wonder what Nancy would do?
Kevin, what happened to you?

The fields of the House republicans need no Gaetz to guard them

At the instigation of Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, a small group of revanchist republicans combined with the House Democrats to remove Kevin McCarthy from his post as Speaker of the House in revenge for his having worked with the Democrats last week to extend funding for the government and avoid a weekend shutdown.  The revanchists have no plan to replace Mr. McCarthy and appear to have believed that their Democratic colleagues would stand behind Mr. McCarthy and vote to keep him in office. 

Their plan has both succeeded and failed spectacularly.  Their plan succeeded in that they won the vote and demoted Mr. McCarthy to the rank and file.  Their plan failed in that they have shown the nation that they have no plan, no agenda, and no goal other than to throw a spanner in the works, as the British say.

That delightful British phrase reminds Isaac of another odd British phrase, this one from the Parliamentary sphere, which points to how the republican leadership should respond to Mr. Gaetz and his cohort if they wish their party to again be taken seriously by the public.  Each party in Parliament appoints a number of its members, called "whips," to communicate the leadership's wishes to the members and to instruct them on how to vote on matters important to the party.  The title "whip" derives from fox hunting; the Oxford English Dictionary defines "whipper-in" as an assistant to a huntsman "who keeps the hounds from straying by driving them back with the whip into the main body of the pack."  The Parliamentary whips similarly keep the backbench members from straying by driving them back into the main body of the pack, the word "whip" having morphed from meaning the instrument itself into meaning the person who wields it.  A party can discipline a recalcitrant or obstructive member by "withdrawing the whip," effectively expelling the member from the party until the leadership decides to "restore the whip."

It's past time for the House republican leadership to do the American equivalent of withdrawing the whip from Mr. Gaetz.  Remove him from all committees, expel him from the caucus, withdraw all funding . . . and if he does not reform, recruit and fund a candidate to oppose him in next year's primary.  The others will fall in line rather than be pushed overboard to join him in Congressional limbo.

Fulton County's indictment of Donald Trump and friends, analyzed

            The 41-count indictment that a Fulton County grand jury handed down today is riveting in its narrative and notable in its detail.  Isaac has read it with great interest.  The grand jury’s accusations are not vague in time and place, nor are they more vague than necessary in describing the witnesses to the 161 numbered acts in furtherance of the election plot.  Those in Mr. Trump’s inner circle who are yet uncharged will read the indictment attentively to determine which of their friends are “Unindicted Conspirator One,” “Unindicted Conspirator Two,” and the other eighteen or so of the unnamed additional conspirators.

            All 19 defendants were charged with violating the Georgia Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (“RICO”) Act.  This charge is particularly ironic, or perhaps poetically just, when applied to Rudolph Giuliani, as he came to fame in the 1980s for using the federal RICO Act to dismantle the core of the New York mafia; as a federal prosecutor he obtained indictments against a long list of the mob’s leaders and lieutenants, convicting most of them.

            The indictment has some Easter eggs within its bulk.  I’ve alluded to one, which is the game of guessing the identities of the unindicted conspirators.  Another is to examine who got indicted with whom.

            The indictment has 41 counts and names 19 defendants.  Every defendant was charged with violating the Georgia RICO Act.  No defendant, however, was charged with violating even half of the 41 counts, and no count except the RICO charge names more than 7 defendants.  Messrs. Trump and Giuliani lead the pack with 13 charges each, sharing in 7 of them.  The runner-up in the indictment list is more obscure; he is Ray Stallings Smith III, a lawyer at a small firm in Atlanta whose practice includes election law.  He faces 12 charges, including all 7 of the charges that name both Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani. 

            At the other end of the spectrum lie Jenna Ellis, Jeffrey Clark, and Mark Meadows, who face only one charge each in addition to the all-hands-on-deck RICO charge (Count 1). Ms. Smith’s [thank you, Kari Chisholm, for catching the error] Ellis's charge (Count 2), which she shares with attorneys Giuliani, Eastman, and Smith, is that she participated in inveigling members of the Georgia Senate to appoint impostor electors.  Mr. Clark’s charge (Count 22), which he faces alone, is that he criminally attempted to knowingly make the false statement that the Justice Department had ”identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States, including the State of Georgia,” asking for permission from acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue to send that message to Georgia’s governor, speaker of the house, and president of the senate.  Count 28 names only Mr. Trump and Mark Meadows and charges them with having unlawfully “solicited, requested, and importuned” Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to unlawfully alter the certified vote.

            So who did get indicted with whom?  (It sounds rather like high school gossip.)  Three of Georgia’s fake electors are among the indicted.  They are the only ones charged with Counts 8, 10, 12, and 14.  Two of them are the only ones charged with Counts 16 and 18.  Those six counts all relate to preparing and signing the false certifications.  They form a distinct group of charges and defendants. 

            A second group of defendants share Counts 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, and 19.  They are Messrs. Trump, Giuliani, Eastman, Chesebro, Smith, and Cheeley, and those counts relate mainly to the attempts to file the false elector certifications. 

            A third group of defendants are Sidney Powell, Cathleen Latham, Scott Hall, and Misty Hampton, the only ones charged with Counts 33 to 38.  Those counts describe the efforts to obtain or break into the voting machines of Coffee County.  Ms. Powell was a visible advocate for Mr. Trump’s cause, but the indictment relegates her to a minor part in the Georgia portion of the broader conspiracy.  Based on the structure of the indictment, Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani were at its center, and Mr. Smith wasn't far from the core.  The skills of high school gossip tell us not who's going out with whom, but who's going down with whom.

Wendell Phillips reminds us that history sometimes rhymes

The recent stalemate among the House republicans over their choice of speaker and the current threats of Speaker McCarthy to refuse to raise the ceiling on the national debt so that the nation can pay its bills brought to mind this delightful observation from a while back:

"A few years ago * * * the Republican party dared to refuse the appropriations for support of government - the most daring act ever ventured in a land that holds Bunker Hill and Brandywine.  They dared to persevere some twenty or thirty days.  It seems a trifle; but it is a very significant straw.  Then for weeks when Banks was elected, and a year ago, again, the whole government was checked till the Republicans put their Speaker in the chair."

Does that bring to mind Newt Gingrich shutting down the government, or Lauren Boebert holding up the organization of the House in January?  The author of the quoted words was Wendell Phillips (1811-1884), the famous orator and abolitionist.  They're from a speech that he gave in Boston on February 17, 1861.  The four omitted words represented by the three asterisks give the joke away: they are "while Pierce was President."

The House Democrats should pick a republican for speaker, but not just any republican

About a year ago, a republican political strategist named Sarah Longwell wrote in The Bulwark that the republican party was facing an ‘extinction event’ that resulted from Donald Trump having converted it into the MAGA party. The flailing efforts of the republican House majority to elect a speaker yesterday and so far today also are another sign that the extinction event has descended on the party.

Its schism into the group of the shamed and silent and the smaller and louder Trump-MAGA group brings back memories of the 1854 fracturing of the Whig Party, with some important differences, the largest of which is that the Whig Party fell apart over an irresolvable policy dispute: should slavery expand, continue, or be eliminated?  No common ground among the factions was available, as the policy difference was over a stark yes-or-no question.

By contrast the modern republican party gave up any pretense of policy ambitions years ago under Newt Gingrich’s leadership.  It has no policy; its modest platform for the 2020 election could be described as “policy” only in the way that a fig leaf can be described as “clothing.”  But where can the remaining rational republicans find a home?  On philosophical grounds they can’t join the Democratic Party, and without a billionaire or two as a funding source and a media presence (their henhouse won’t stand without a Fox to advertise it) they can’t start a new national party.  The two-party system needs two strong and responsible parties, and the republican leadership is too frightened of its cohort of crazies to make the effort to return it to reason.  Maybe what saves the system is not right-wing repentance but a variant of the solution played out in the Utah senate race, where the Democrats tried to elect a rational conservative to replace Mike Lee, something like the plain-bellied Sneetches temporarily donning stars.  The Democrats could contribute to bringing the opposition toward reason by picking a few moderate republican representatives and then voting as a bloc for those representatives, one after another, until one of their candidates from across the aisle attracts the votes of 10 sane republicans.  Odd as it would be for the Democrats to vote for a republican for speaker, doing so is their one way to get a speaker of the House who won't have had to make promises to the Boeberts and Gosars of the republican caucus.