In secret, behind locked gates, our Nation's Oldest City dumped a landfill in a lake (Old City Reservoir), while emitting sewage in our rivers and salt marsh. Organized citizens exposed and defeated pollution, racism and cronyism. We elected a new Mayor. We're transforming our City -- advanced citizenship. Ask questions. Make disclosures. Demand answers. Be involved. Expect democracy. Report and expose corruption. Smile! Help enact a St. Augustine National Park and Seashore. We shall overcome!
Edmund Burke in Britain’s House of Commons.Credit...Photo12/Universal Images Group, via Getty Images
Good column by a conservative columnist about DJT.
One of JFK's best quotes, before the Canadian Parliament, was his mashup or alteration of an Edmund Burke quote, "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
My Sophomore Political Theory Professor Jose Sorzano, loved this quote, and shared it with our Georgetown Univeristy School of Foreign Service class.
Prof. Sorzano taught us that "ideas have consequences." He later was as Deputy United Nations Ambassador, under another GU SFS Prof., Dr. Jeanne Kirkpatrick, under President Ronald Wilson Reagan.
From The New York Times:
Opinion
Why Edmund Burke Still Matters
He reminds us it’s hard to respect democratic political institutions while disdaining the founders of those institutions.
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
Aug. 5, 2020
Had it not been for the revolution in France, Edmund Burke would likely have been remembered, a bit vaguely, as an 18th-century philosopher-statesman of extravagant rhetorical gifts but frustratingly ambivalent views. The Irish-born member of the British Parliament was sympathetic to the grievances of the American colonies but not (like his onetime friend Thomas Paine) an enthusiastic champion of their independence; an acerbic critic of George III but a firm defender of monarchy; a staunch opponent of English rapacity in India but a supporter of British Empire; an advocate for the gradual emancipation of at least some slaves, but no believer in equality.
He was also an unabashed snob. “The occupation of a hairdresser,” he wrote, “cannot be a matter of honor to any person.”
Burke’s name endures because of his uncompromising opposition to the French Revolution — a view he laid out as some of Britain’s more liberal thinkers thought it represented humanity’s best hopes. “Reflections on the Revolution in France” was published in November 1790, more than a year after the fall of the Bastille but before the Reign of Terror, when it still seemed possible that Louis XVI would survive as a constitutional monarch and the country wouldn’t descend into a blood bath.
Burke foresaw, more accurately than most of his great contemporaries, what the revolution would bring: the executions of Louis and Marie Antoinette; the ineffectuality of moderate revolutionary leaders (“a sort of people who affect to proceed as if they thought that men may deceive without fraud, rob without injustice, and overturn every thing without violence”); the rise of a military dictator in the mold of Napoleon; and a long European war in which the “Republic of Regicide” would seek to subjugate the world in the name of liberating it.
How did Burke get it right about the ultimate course of events in France — and, by extension, so many subsequent revolutions that aimed to establish morally enlightened societies and wound up producing despotism and terror? The question is worth pondering in light of two main ideological currents of today: the tear-it-all-down populism that has swept so much of the right in the past five years and the tear-it-all-down progressivism that threatens to sweep the left.
At the core of Burke’s view of the revolution is a profound understanding of how easily things can be shattered in the name of moral betterment, national purification and radical political transformation. States, societies and personal consciences are not Lego-block constructions to be disassembled and reassembled with ease. They are more like tapestries, passed from one generation to the next, to be carefully mended at one edge, gracefully enlarged on the other and otherwise handled with caution lest a single pulled thread unravel the entire pattern. “The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity,” Burke wrote. “And therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man’s nature, or to the quality of his affairs.”
Burke’s objection to the French revolutionaries is that they paid so little attention to this complexity: They were men of theory, not experience. Men of experience tend to be cautious about gambling what they have painstakingly gained. Men of theory tend to be reckless with what they’ve inherited but never earned. “They have wrought underground a mine that will blow up, at one grand explosion, all examples of antiquity, all precedents, charters, and acts of parliament. They have ‘the rights of men.’ Against these there can be no prescriptions.”
Not that Burke was against rights per se. The usual caricature of Burke is that he is the conservative’s conservative, a man for whom any type of change was dangerous in practice and anathema on principle. That view of him would have astonished his contemporaries, who knew him as a champion of Catholic emancipation — the civil rights movement of his day — and other reformist (and usually unpopular) causes.
A fairer reading of Burke would describe him as either a near-liberal or a near-conservative — a man who defied easy categorization in his time and defies it again in ours. He believed in limited government, gradual reform, parliamentary sovereignty and, with caveats and qualifications, individual rights. But he also believed that to secure rights, it wasn’t enough simply to declare them on paper, codify them in law and claim them as entitlements from a divine being or the general will. The conditions of liberty had to be nurtured through prudent
All of this may sound suspicious to modern readers, especially progressive ones. But consider what Burke might have made of Trump and Trumpism. He would have been bemused by the phrase “drain the swamp”: To take the metaphor seriously, one would end up destroying all the life within the swamp, leaving only mud. He would have been revolted by the Trump family’s self-dealing: Among the great causes of Burke’s life was his role in the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the de facto governor general of India, for corrupt and cruel administration.
Above all, Burke would have been disgusted by Trump’s manners. “Manners are of more importance than laws,” he wrote.
“The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us …. They give their whole form and color to our lives. According to their quality, they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them.”
Burke’s understanding of the centrality of manners to norms, of norms to morals, of morals to culture and of culture to the health of the political order means that he would have been unimpressed by claims that Trump had scored policy “wins,” like appointing conservative judges or cutting the corporate tax rate. Those would have been baubles floating in befouled waters.
Trump’s real legacy, in Burke’s eyes, would be his relentless debasement of political culture: of personal propriety; of respect for institutions; of care for tradition; of trust between citizens and civil authority; of a society that believes — and has reason to believe — in its own essential decency. “To make us love our country,” he wrote, “ our country ought to be lovely.”
Then again, Burke would have been no less withering in his views of the far left. “You began ill,” he said of the French revolutionaries, “because you began by despising everything that belonged to you.”
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For Burke, the materials of successful social change had to be found in what the country already provided — historically, culturally, institutionally — not in what it lacked. Britain became the most liberal society of its day, Burke argued, because it held fast to what he called “our ancient, indisputable laws and liberties,” handed down “as an inheritance from our forefathers.” Inheritance, he added, “furnishes a sure principle of transmission; without at all excluding a principle of improvement.”
The people now pulling down statues of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and spray-painting “1619” on them may believe they are striking a blow against the racial hypocrisy of the founding fathers. But if Burke were alive now, he would likely note that people who trade ancient liberties — freedom of speech, for instance — for newfangled rights (freedom from speech) could soon wind up with neither. He’d observe that it may not be easy to teach respect for democratic political institutions while inculcating contempt for the founders of those institutions. He’d suggest that if protesters want to make the case for fuller equality for all Americans, better to enlist the memory of the founders in their cause than hand them over to their political opponents to champion. He’d caution that destructiveness toward property tends to lead to violence toward people.
And he’d warn that the damage being done — to civil order, public property and, most of all perhaps, to the values demonstrators claim to champion — may not be easy to undo. “Rage and phrensy will pull down more in half an hour, than prudence, deliberation and foresight can build up in a hundred years.”
Because Burke champions a different concept of liberty than the one most Americans cherish, it may be easy to dismiss his teachings as interesting but ultimately irrelevant. George Will, in his magnum opus “The Conservative Sensibility,” speaks of Burke as a “throne-and-altar” conservative of little relevance to American experience. Whatever else might be said of events in places like Portland or Seattle, it is not the storming of the Bastille, and wokeness isn’t Jacobinism — at least not yet. The time to write “Reflections on the Revolutions in America” is still a ways off.
A ways off — but ever more visible on the horizon. To read and admire Burke does not require us to embrace his views, much less treat him as a prophet. But it’s an opportunity to learn something from a man who saw, more clearly than most, how “very plausible schemes, with very pleasing commencements, have often shameful and lamentable conclusions.”
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Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post.
These two ninnies are a disgrace to the State of Florida. The election of two unqualified Governors in a row makes us yearn for the days when Florida Governors cared about people. Here's A.G. Gancarski about the public spat between erstwhile Governor RICHARD LYNN SCOTT, now the junior Senator from Florida, vs. incumbent Boy Governor RONALD DION DeSANTIS.
The blame game continues for Florida’s current and former Governors regarding failures in the state’s unemployment system, with Sen. Rick Scott disclaiming responsibility for the ongoing situation.
Scott made the comments Wednesday afternoon on the Fox Business Network, in the wake of criticisms from DeSantis, who said the CONNECTsystem was designed to fail, replete with “pointless roadblocks” designed to discourage claims.
The Senator’s take was that the Governor should handle his business.
“Go solve problems,” Scott advised. “Quit blaming others.”
“It’s a tough time to be Governor. Some people are leaders. Some people take responsibility. Some people solve problems. And some people blame others,” Scott said to host Charles Payne.
When asked if DeSantis was blaming him, Scott redirected.
“My experience is what you appreciate is people saying ‘You know what? I came in here. I fixed problems. I worked hard to solve the problems I committed to do.”
Whether Scott’s words silence the current Governor remains to be seen.
In an interview with Jim DeFede of CBS 4 in Miami over the weekend, Gov. Ron DeSantis again reminded Floridians that he inherited the failed CONNECT system from his predecessor.
“I think the goal was for whoever designed, it was, ‘Let’s put as many kind of pointless roadblocks along the way, so people just say, oh, the hell with it, I’m not going to do that’,” DeSantis told DeFede, before distancing himself from that philosophy.
DeSantis stopped short of blaming the former Governor personally but said the system was “definitely” built to fail.
“I’m not sure if it was his [intention], but I think definitely in terms of how it was internally constructed, you know. It was definitely done in a way to lead to the least number of claims being paid out,” the Governor told the Miami reporter.
With Florida now deep into the second year of the DeSantis administration, it remains to be seen when or how the overhaul of all systems to be “user friendly” will happen. DeSantis has touted increased payouts from the system amid a series of technical improvements during the spring and summer.
But for DeSantis, who has been dogged by falling poll numbers amid scrutiny of his handling of the coronavirus crisis, the unemployment issue has proved to be a helpful refrain to remind people that he’s not Rick Scott.
“The system broke and we had to make a decision how to go forward…. In fact, the system was so bad it basically needed to be redesigned,” the Governor said.
DeSantis said “when the dust settles” there would be an Inspector General investigation into the procurement process. While the dust hasn’t settled yet, DeSantis discussed the ongoing investigation with DeFede.
“From the end of the third week, third, fourth week of March through most of April, you know, we were in really dire straits with that system. So I do think we should get the results of the IG. And then, if there needs to be some type of suit or some type of accountability, we absolutely need to do it. I mean, my thing is like a lot of these unemployment systems throughout the country, you know, weren’t very good, but a lot of them were like 40, 50 years old. Ours wasn’t really old. I mean, ours was really five, six years ago. And it should have been done better for that price tag to produce better results.”
A.G. Gancarski has been a correspondent for FloridaPolitics.com since 2014. In 2018, he was a finalist for an Association of Alternative Newsweeklies "best political column." He can be reached at AG@FloridaPolitics.com
Our right to vote must be zealously guarded against theft. As my mom told me when I was a little boy, "Republicans never steal anything small." As she, I and everyone else learned in 2000, Republicans steal elections. It's time for some "good trouble," as the late John Lewis would have said.
A stench in the nostrils of our Nation, DJT's attack on our 2020 election exposed by Law Professors Tribe and Taub, and Mr. Geltzer in The Atlantic:
Trump’s attack on voting by mail has several fronts, but one is by far the most serious: his attempt to slow down mail service, perhaps in a targeted way, while also insisting that only ballots counted on November 3 are valid. In addition to casting doubt on the entire election, another purpose of this scheme is to engineer a scenario in which Trump can pressure Republican-controlled legislatures to ignore the popular vote in their Democratic-leaning swing state (think Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) and instead select an Electoral College slate that supports him. Trump’s attempt to cut short the counting of valid votes is flatly contrary to constitutional law and federal statutes. Even so, states can and should do more to protect American’s mailed-in votes. States should immediately enact new legislation or take other legal steps clarifying that they intend for Congress to honor electors they choose, and that they may need a bit of time to finalize choosing them—ideally doing so by December 23 and no later than January 6, 2021, when Congress meets in special session to certify the election results. Through state-level action, Trump’s efforts can be neutralized.
We can see glimmers of Trump’s approach in what he said about Florida’s tight 2018 gubernatorial and Senate races, and he’ll say it again to delegitimize the counting of mail-in ballots that might cost him reelection. We’ve received a frightening preview in the Census Bureau’s recent announcement that it plans to cut off population-counting efforts one month early, well before needed to meet the December 31 deadline for delivering census results to Congress.. This decision was made after the Trump administration itself had asked for more time, not less. It’s the same play: When Trump doesn’t like the numbers coming in, he stops counting.
Halting vote-counting after Election Day requires Trump to stage a three-pronged attack: slowing mail delivery, then urging Republican state legislatures to deem Election Day “failed” because of the many uncounted votes, and finally denouncing as illegitimate all vote-counting that continues after Election Day—even as slowly delivered mail-in ballots keep arriving. Leading the first step is Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who’s reportedly shutting down post offices and slowing mail delivery under the guise of cost-cutting. Employees say that piles upon piles of letters and packages remain undelivered, stranded for weeks on end. These efforts undermine public confidence in the Postal Service and threaten to slow the distribution of blank ballots to voters and the return of completed ballots to state officials—with a likely disproportionate effect on Democratic-leaning urban voters, for whom the coronavirus’s circulation in cities makes mail-in voting particularly appealing. The likely surge in mail-in ballots that the pandemic will encourage suggests that tallying the election results won’t be completed on November 3 but will take days, possibly weeks, to complete accurately.
Trump will almost certainly use this delay as an opportunity to cast doubt on the whole election. He may even try to urge Republican-controlled legislatures in states that tend to vote blue but supported him in 2016 to deem Election Day “failed” given the uncounted votes, as well as pressure those legislatures to then exploit a federal lawthat allows them to come up with a new way to appoint presidential electors—such as handpicking a slate committed to Trump.
Trump may additionally think his hand is strengthened by another federal law that tells Congress to respect each state’s final resolution of ballot disputes if made by December 8. This date may well be too soon for all mail-in ballots to be counted when the pandemic is sure to increase the number of such ballots cast. But that provision is a mere “safe harbor”: It doesn’t require that states resolve ballot disputes by December 8. The only statutory deadline for a state to send its tally is December 23, and the only deadline for receiving a state’s tally—the true constitutional deadline—is January 6, when Congress meets in special session to certify the election results. So there’s no excuse for a state to call its election a failure or for Congress to disregard the results so long as they’re resolved ideally by December 23 but ultimately no later than January 6—not December 8.
Here’s why: Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution gives Congress the power to set the date for the states to “give their votes.” Congress chose the “first Monday after the second Wednesday in December,” which this year is December 14. However, Congress also provided a backup date, the “fourth Wednesday in December,” which this year is December 23. This is the day when the president of the Senate requests any state from which no certified vote has been received to send one “by the most expeditious method possible.” The law requires any such state to transmit its vote count by registered mail to the Senate president (or if the president is not present, the archivist). Insisting on December 8, rather than December 23, cuts short by nearly one-third the time available to make sure that every legitimate vote is counted—and it plays into the absurd claim Trump seems prepared to make: Because there might not be time to count all mail-in ballots this year, none should be counted.
In its infamous Bush v. Gore decision, the Supreme Court’s five-justice majority treated the early-December “safe harbor” date as a firm deadline for Florida to stop its recount—but only because of the majority’s view of Florida law. The Court pointed to language from Florida’s Supreme Court suggesting that the Florida legislature, by trying to meet the safe-harbor date, intended to sink all ballots that failed to be recounted by then. And the Florida legislature, to be fair, hadn’t made it as clear as it might that it had no such perverse intention.
States can and should act now to avoid Bush v. Gore treatment. Before November 3, they should pass new laws or enact new policies through their executive branch that make a commitment to democracy, regardless of political party (or seek definitive rulings from their highest court before that date). Such efforts wipe off the table Trump’s potential election-tampering tactics.
First, states should pass statutes making clear that vote-counting must be done not by December 8, but by January 6—and ideally by December 23, which still provides crucial additional time. This will ensure that a state legislature can’t claim voters “failed to make a choice” simply because vote-counting necessarily continued past Election Day, and that Congress can’t disregard results from states simply because they arrive after December 8, or after December 14, the statutory (but not constitutional) date set for the Electoral College to meet and to send vote counts to the Senate and archivist.
Second, states should adopt a postmark rule, whereby every ballot postmarked on or before November 3 is included in the tally. If the question isn’t whether ballots are received by November 3 but instead whether they’re sent by that date, a deliberately tardy Postal Service no longer poses the same threat. Of course, not all states may be able to accomplish this through legislation, but state courts may provide another promising path. One example is the set of voters in Minnesota who sued their secretary of state to challenge the state law that said absentee ballots would be counted only if received by 8 p.m. on Election Day. A Minnesota court approved a settlement with the voters that requires all absentee ballots to be postmarked on or before November 3 and arrive no more than seven days after Election Day to be counted. This decision indicates that any rule to count only ballots received by Election Day during this pandemic is an unlawful burden on voting rights, in violation of the equal-protection provisions of state constitutions and the U.S. Constitution.
Third, states should start the mail-in and early-voting processes well before November 3, and as soon as the candidates up and down the ballot are known. This will help states count the unprecedented wave of mail-in ballots they’re about to receive.
Fourth, states should invest in vote-by-mail infrastructure, such as what Colorado has in place, including dedicated drop boxes for ballots that bypass the postal system entirely. What’s more, states should urge loudly that federal money to help with this task be included in the next coronavirus-relief package.
And fifth, states should, in every way possible—including by litigation—erase any doubt that they mean to count every legitimate ballot, even if counting needs to continue not just until December 8 but until December 23 and, if necessary, until January 6. The difference could be between losing American democracy and saving it.
Trump thinks he has a trio of tricks up his sleeve for November: Slow the mail, rely on Republican state legislatures to deem Election Day a failure with so many votes still uncounted, and decry as illegitimate all vote-counting that persists past Election Day, and certainly past December 8. State legislatures and courts should act now to show just how futile this strategy would be for Trump. In so doing, they would be shoring up the electorate’s confidence in our voting system’s integrity, and would be reinforcing the foundations of a great democracy by reaffirming a simple principle: If we believe in one person, one vote, then every American’s lawfully cast vote should be counted.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.
LAURENCE H. TRIBE is a University professor of constitutional law emeritus at Harvard Law School.
JENNIFER TAUB is a professor of law at the Western New England University School of Law.
JOSHUA A. GELTZERis the executive director of Georgetown University’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection. He was the senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council from 2015 to 2017.
aa"Black Legend" is the accumulated traditions of propaganda and Hispanophobia according to which Spanish imperialism is regarded as cruel, bigoted, exploitative and self-righteous in excess of the reality. - Dr. Charles Gibson (1958)
aaPerhaps the most effective weapon against Spain in its 16th century world dominance was a public relations campaign, la Leyenda Negra, the Black Legend.
aaThe term was coined by Julián JuderÃas in his 1914 book La leyenda negra y la verdad histórica (The Black Legend and Historical Truth), to describe the allegedly biased depiction of Spain and Spaniards as "cruel", "intolerant" and "fanatical" in anti-Spanish literature starting in the 16th century.
aaThe Black Legend propaganda is said to be influenced by national and religious rivalries as seen in works by early Protestant historians and Anglo-Saxon writers, describing the period of Spanish imperialism in a deliberately negative way.
aaThese books were extensively used by the Dutch during their fight for independence from Spain, and taken up by the English to justify their piracy and wars against the Spanish.
Foxe's book was among Sir Francis Drake's favorites; Drake himself was and is regarded by the Spaniards as a cruel and bloodthirsty pirate.
aaThe two northern nations were not only emerging as Spain's rivals for worldwide colonialism, but were also strongholds of Protestantism while Spain was the most powerful Roman Catholic country of the period.
aaFormer Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, a student of Spanish colonial history, in his Coronado and our Spanish Legacy: To the Inland Empire, noted, “Only once since the invention of the printing press has a successful campaign of defamation lasting centuries been waged against an entire people.
aa“That nation is Spain, and that campaign of calumny - known to modern historians as the ‘Hispanophobia Black Legend’ - made Spaniards pariahs and demeaned the character of the Spanish people. This myth, I am convinced, has influenced earlier generations of Americans to cast a cold eye on the achievements of our Spanish pioneers.”
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