Tag: gerald ford
Retired Justice Stevens Says Trump Must ‘Comply’ With Subpoenas

Retired Justice Stevens Says Trump Must ‘Comply’ With Subpoenas

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

When President Gerald R. Ford appointed John Paul Stevens to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1975, it was hailed as a victory for conservatism: Stevens replaced Justice William O. Douglas, an unapologetically liberal Franklin Delano Roosevelt nominee who had been on the High Court since 1939. Yet even though he was a conservative and Democrats controlled the U.S. Senate in 1975, Stevens was confirmed unanimously; not one Democratic senator voted against his confirmation. And the 99-year-old Stevens, who retired in 2010 and was replaced by Barack Obama appointee Elena Kagan, reflected on the current state of the Supreme Court and U.S. politics in an interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Jess Bravin.

President Donald Trump is vowing to resist all subpoenas issued by investigative committees in the Democrat-led House of Representatives—and Stevens believes that Trump is overreaching.

“I think there are things we should be concerned about, there’s no doubt about that,” Stevens tells Bravin in his article. And he goes on to elaborate, “The president is exercising powers that do not really belong to him. I mean, he has to comply with subpoenas and things like that.”

When Bravin asked Stevens how the Supreme Court might—in light of the fact that it now includes two Trump appointees, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch—rule on the current conflict between Democratic House committees and the Trump Administration, Stevens responded, “I wouldn’t want to predict that anybody’s going to take the incorrect view. But certainly, the correct view is pretty clear.”

One of the most revealing parts of Bravin’s interview with Stevens is the former justice’s views on political gerrymandering. Republicans are often criticized by Democrats in 2019 for gerrymandering congressional districts, and Stevens told Bravin he is “disappointed” by federal judges’ “failure to treat political gerrymandering just like racial gerrymandering, because it’s certainly easier to identify which voters belong to a particular party than knowing what their race is.”

After Douglas announced his retirement in 1975, Ford was filling the first Supreme Court vacancy since President Richard Nixon had resigned because of the Watergate scandal in August 1974. Ford picked an appellate judge who had been appointed by Nixon, and he was seeking to replace a New Deal liberal who was exiting the Supreme Court with someone whose family wasn’t known for liking the New Deal.

Bravin recalls, “Many Court watchers expected Justice Stevens, the successor to Franklin Roosevelt’s last remaining appointee, to move the Court rightward. During the 1930s, the Stevens family—whose name adorned a prominent Chicago hotel—was no fan of the New Deal, and the justice remains skeptical of liberal verities like the minimum wage.”

But Bravin adds that by the time he retired, the justice “was the unlikely head of the Court’s liberal minority. He attributes that more to the ideological purity subsequent Republican presidents required of their judicial nominees than to any leftward evolution of his own views.”

In other words, Stevens is still a conservative in 2019. And one could argue that philosophically, he never left the Republican Party—it left him.

IMAGE: Photo of retired Justice John Paul Stevens, Legal Times via Flickr

 

 

Visiting The Gallery Of Vice Presidents — Yes, They Do Matter

Visiting The Gallery Of Vice Presidents — Yes, They Do Matter

WASHINGTON — Mike Pence, the Republican Indiana governor, showed more style in the vice presidential debate against earnest Democratic Senator Tim Kaine. So there’s work to do.

Attend closely to each candidate. Ask how the Number Two plays on the national stage and how much the stakes matter. More than you might think. When the Veep steers the ship, at times it’s right into the rocks. Whatever your political party, remember Sarah Palin, the unserious pick made by John McCain, the elderly 2008 Republican standard-bearer. That told us, right quick, about his wild judgment.

Teddy Roosevelt is the sunniest member of the club who succeeded a president who died in office. That was a century ago. Since April 1945, Democrat Harry S. Truman, the ailing Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s vice president, has been seen as another fortunate successor.

Sure, we get lucky across the stepping stones of time. They say Gerald Ford — the only Veep ever to succeed a president who resigned — was a decent chap in the House and as president for two years.

So listen for the voices on the zeitgeist. The first 11 presidents, from George Washington to James Polk, elected in 1844, came in pairs, though Thomas Jefferson had to do one better, with a bunch.

Early leaders in their ambition and lust for power, Jefferson had two Virginia proteges, James Madison and James Monroe, succeed him. The key word is “Virginia,” for they owned slave plantations within riding distance, of course. Nothing but the best for Jefferson.

This created a Virginia presidential dynasty for, wait for it, 24 straight years.

Jefferson had two vice presidents, one of whom was the elegant Aaron Burr, who would have made a better commander in chief than the hapless Madison. The fourth president fled the capital as the British army burned it in 1814.

Unlike Jefferson or Madison, Burr was a Revolutionary Army officer. But he was a younger New Yorker who tied Jefferson in the 1800 presidential election. Jefferson had an enemies list, too, and intrigued against Burr, keeping up the famous charm.

Setting another precedent for the later Bush family, Adams brought his namesake son, John Quincy Adams, to the highest office in 1824, shortly before the father died. But slaveholder and general Andrew Jackson “Old Hickory” beat him in a bitter rematch.

Andrew Jackson’s vice president, Martin Van Buren, succeeded him peacefully, just as Yankee John Adams, the first vice president, succeeded the general on horseback, George Washington. Different as they were, the first Federalists tried to set an example for future generations.

I might add that Jackson groomed a protege to the presidency, James Polk, after he left office. Jackson and Jefferson were presidential history’s only “doubleheaders.”

Then there was beloved Abraham Lincoln, who worked the land himself. But a field trip reminded me he made a near-fatal choice in his 1864 running mate.

Oh, the winds of history blew me away to a stark, chilling sight: a military courtroom. The “Lincoln conspirators” were tried here, with a makeshift gallows built outside at Fort McNair. Four assassination conspirators were convicted and hanged in the summer of 1865. The 16th president was the first one to die in office.

As Civil War guns were stilled, Andrew Johnson, the vice president, could not have been less like Lincoln. The roughhewn, tactless Tennessean was not one to heal wounds of war. Hated by North and South alike, he was impeached.

You know the scene: Ford’s Theatre on a spring night as actor John Wilkes Booth stormed President Lincoln’s box and shot him behind the ear.

It seems the stuff of Shakespearean tragedy. “Macbeth” was Lincoln’s favorite.

The four — one was a woman, innkeeper Mary Surratt — were treated harshly, on Secretary of War Edwin Stanton’s orders: kept wrapped in hot blankets and hoods in Washington’s heavy heat. The nation’s blood had spilled again; Lincoln was the final casualty of the Civil War.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com

What We Lost 40 Years Ago When Nixon Resigned

What We Lost 40 Years Ago When Nixon Resigned

Four decades ago this weekend, in the living room of Jerry Ford’s high-school civics teacher, I watched on television the end of the Watergate nightmare. What we could not have known then was that we were also at the beginning of a new national nightmare, a much worse disaster that slowly erodes our Constitution, our economy and our freedoms.

Pop Churm was long retired from South High School in Grand Rapids, Michigan, as we sat silently and observed President Richard Nixon announce his resignation on the evening of August 8, 1974, and then at noon the next day saw Jerry Ford sworn in, the first and so far only unelected president.

Churm then taught me and Detroit Free Press readers a powerful lesson — one that America has yet to learn — about decency, the corrupting influence of money in politics, and the value of not merely having vigilant watchdogs, but responding when they bark.  His was a lesson about government that serves not the donors of secret political money, but the people.

Now, 40 years on, it is clear that America took the wrong lessons from Watergate, just as it continues to misunderstand 9/11 to the detriment of our liberties, our security and our wealth. Had only America responded to both of these events with the wisdom of Ford’s teacher, what a better country we would live in today.

To Pop Churm, secret money in politics made Watergate possible, financing not just the burglaries and dirty tricks committed on White House orders, but giving the donors secretive influence that inherently corrupted our democracy and the people we temporarily grant the power to administer our government.

Churm taught Ford in 1930 that every penny of political money should be open and accounted for, lest temptation and human frailty damage the body politic and ruin one’s character. It was a practical lesson that evidently no one taught to a majority of today’s Supreme Court justices.

To teach students about integrity and political campaigns, Churm had the students organize mock political parties to run candidates class office. Each party was limited, in this Great Depression year, to 10 bucks.

As I reported in my front-page story back then:

To make sure no one used campaign funds for dirty tricks or teenage pranks, Churm had the students organize a watchdog committee to keep an eye on all receipts and expenditures. Each party had to file a report on its financial activities at the end of the campaign. Political reformers today are still trying to get that kind of mechanism to watch real political fundraising.

‘We try to teach the students honesty and integrity and dependability,’ Churm said. ‘We tried to teach them that they should be working for the interests of their school and the class, not their own.’

Churm smiled a bit when Ford said in his inauguration address that ‘truth is the glue that holds government together.’

Pop Churm says he is confident that with his former pupil in the Oval Office, ‘there will be a new era in government and that those who serve the people will be beyond reproach and the honesty and dignity will prevail.’

“Here’s an ordinary man, a regular fellow,” Churm, who was then 87 years old, told me, getting up to switch off the television, “not one who has his head up in the clouds, a man who has led a decent life. It just goes to show that if you have character and decency and honesty you’ll get ahead.”

Churm’s words captured what all of America felt in this peaceful transition of power: hope for a better future and change we believed in.

A 1935 portrait of Churm by painter Mathias Alten. (via Ford Presidential Library)

A 1935 portrait of Churm by painter Mathias Alten (via Ford Presidential Library).

Once the Senate hearings had established what the president knew and when he knew it, Nixon at long last had the decency to resign, saving us from an impeachment trial. Looking back, we forget how much Nixon was a creature of the New Deal. He experimented with cash grants to the poor, a “black capitalism” program that morphed into a loan program for immigrant cabbies in New York City, and pretty good environmental laws. Were Nixon to come back today, though, his own party would reject him as an ultra-liberal. Politics reporters would describe him as Dennis Kucinich Lite.

When Nixon left the White House, we celebrated how the scheme of our Constitution worked under pressure. The separation of powers, the checks and balances, mixed with an aroused citizenry — and no small amount of animus for a paranoid and hard-drinking politician whom even some of his allies personally detested — brought an end to an administration polluted with secret political donations.

In a foreshadowing of today’s massive electronic surveillance of Americans, what ultimately brought Nixon down were government recordings. Unbeknownst to Oval Office visitors or many of his top staff, Nixon had tape recorders installed to make a full record of his Oval Office conversations except for 18 minutes of inconvenient truth.

What Nixon thought was the innocent recording of Oval Office conversations — a future aid in writing his history of his presidency — destroyed him. Just as the words from massive and illegal surveillance of Americans’ phone calls and emails pour into ever more government computer files where we are told they should not concern us. Yet events unseen may turn any of those conversations and emails into swords to be wielded against any among us deemed an enemy of the state if only because of our religion, the exercise of our rights, or any other offense to a government that is becoming a power unto itself.

What no one could have grasped that day was that Watergate would not rejuvenate politics, would not restore the 80 percent-and-above voter participation of the late 19th century. Instead, Watergate would prompt many millions of Americans to shun politics, saying they wanted nothing to do with such dirty business, weakening our freedoms.

After Watergate so many Americans would turn off, tune out and drop out of politics that by 1996 less than half of the adult population bothered to cast a ballot, though that figure has begun to rise as voters born after Nixon’s departure cast ballots.

What we could not have foreseen was how turning our backs on a system that worked when it most needed to work would benefit those who profit from government or who want to impose their ideology, be it the fantasy that invading Iraq on a pretext would bring democracy, peace and stability to the Middle East or that corporations have political and religious rights, rights they are now using to trample those of actual people.

And certainly no one back then, a decade before Orwell’s 1984, could have imagined that judicial activists on the Supreme Court would fashion from whole cloth a cloak of invisibility around political donations and donors. Certainly not Pop Churm.

Churm hid his given name, Percy, even before he started teaching at South High School in Grand Rapids in 1917.  By the time a stocky blond track and football athlete named Jerry Ford, class of 1931, came along, the history teacher had become a much-loved coach known as Pop.

As advisor to Ford’s senior class, Churm created some 15 student committees to oversee class affairs from dances to the yearbook.

“Jerry was always honest and dependable,” Pop Churm recalled. “You told him to do something and he just did it. He never got into any kind of trouble. He had high moral standards,” Churm said, adding, “he wasn’t ever selfish and he isn’t vain at all. And he wasn’t a stuffed shirt about it, either.”

Ford served on the yearbook picture committee, which Churm recalled sought competitive bids from photographers for the senior class portraits. It was one of many things he said he taught students so that in life, in business, and in politics, they would be smart and honest. Those elected or appointed to government posts, Churm said he taught, should always conduct themselves with integrity, viewing themselves as servants of the people trusted for a spell with power, not as powers that be.

Sadly, things work did not work out as Pop Churm hoped after the decent and affable Republican congressman from Grand Rapids left office. In each of the subsequent administrations, in varying degrees, we have faced the same problem that Pop Churm guided that stocky athlete away from more than eight decades ago – the corrupting influence of money, especially how it makes government distant from the people from whom it derives its power and legitimacy.

We have lost the idea Pop Churm taught: That those in power are stewards, temporarily granted powers by us to act on our behalf.  Today it costs so much to run for Congress or the Senate that lawmakers have big donors on speed dial, but not Joan Q. Citizen. Presidential politics is even worse in this regard of craven obeisance to donors.

Today perhaps 100,000 lobbyists work Washington and the state capitals. Today money talks more than anyone could have imagined when Nixon henchmen had the equivalent of less than $2 million in today’s money for dirty tricks.

And we suffer as a result, paying tribute to big corporations that refuse to invest much of their shareholders’ money in America or pay taxes on their profits, while demanding hidden gifts of taxpayer dollars to pay for new factories or offices.

Pop Churm told me he would have made sure that any student who stole a penny – a mere penny – from the 10 bucks he allowed each of the mock political parties at South High to raise would not have received a diploma. That bright line struck me back then as harsh, but effective. What didn’t occur to me or anyone else was that in the decades following Watergate we would drift so far from the idea of decency, of integrity and of holding government accountable through transparency.

What no one imagined was that in politics the power of money, especially unaccountable money, would grow like kudzu, strangling the body politic.

Who could have imagined back then that four decades later, the lines between private gain and public duty would blur until they were virtually erased by our Supreme Court, so much so that the corrupting influence of secret money in politics ceases to be the news of the day?

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

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Weekend Reader: ‘The Invisible Bridge: The Fall Of Nixon And The Rise Of Reagan’

Weekend Reader: ‘The Invisible Bridge: The Fall Of Nixon And The Rise Of Reagan’

Today the Weekend Reader brings you The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan by journalist and historian Rick Perlstein. Following up on his previous book, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, Perlstein dives into the rise of GOP darling Ronald Reagan in the 1970s. The former actor and governor of California was an unlikely contender for the White House when he announced his candidacy against President Gerald Ford, but his political savvy eventually prevailed—Reagan’s patriotism enchanted Americans who were disheartened and battered by both Nixon’s Watergate scandal and a foundering economy. Perlstein’s historical analysis looks deeper than the 70s headlines and provides an essential and thorough understanding of Americans’ perception of politics, Ronald Reagan, and conservatism during a pivotal era.  

You can pre-order the book here.

Thus arrived an unlikely development: chasing spooks became a political opportunity. Frank Church, the liberal Democratic senator from Idaho, a longtime critic of the CIA (“I will do whatever I can, as one senator,” he had said years earlier, “to bring about a full-scale congressional investigation of the CIA”) and scourge of the Vietnam War (“a monstrous immorality”)—and a presidential hopeful—maneuvered himself into the chairmanship of the new Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. And for one of the members of the new Rockefeller commission, CBS reported, “the assignment could help keep presidential hopes alive.”

That would be Governor Ronald Reagan, a surprise pick that had Washington insiders wondering if President Ford—approval rating: 42 percent—was more worried about a nomination challenge than anyone had previously thought. The New York Times did not approve. Reagan, it reported in a February article that read like an editorial, had “missed three of the four weekly meetings of the Presidential commis­sion investigating the Central Intelligence Agency.” He “reportedly told President Ford when he was asked to join the panel that his speaking engagements might conflict with the meetings.” His secretary promised Reagan would “catch up by reading the transcripts of the missed ses­sions”—though, “according to the commission staff, Mr. Reagan has not yet visited the commission headquarters, where hundreds of pages of transcripts are kept in locked files.” Instead, “During January, he gave seven ‘major addresses’ to such groups as the International Safari Club, in Las Vegas.”

Who could take seriously a lightweight like that? Though CBS still spied a possible opening for a Reagan presidential bid: “If the economy overwhelms President Ford.” Portents hinted at just that. In fact, that news was getting downright apocalyptic.

In December economists announced that the nation was officially in a recession. By January the projected annual growth rate was negative 5 percent. A Harris poll found only 11 percent of the country thought Ford was “keeping the economy healthy.” Even the Godfather of Soul got into the act: “People! People! Got to get over, before we get under,” growled James Brown in a new hit that was number four on the R&B charts: “There ain’t no funky jobs to be found. Taxes going up . . . now I drink from a paper cup. Gettin’ bad!”

On the heels of a Pentagon move to eliminate 11,600 civilian jobs at military bases, the auto industry announced 40,000 layoffs. Ford Motors cut production schedules at eleven of its twenty North American assem­bly plants and most of its forty-five manufacturing plants. Chrysler laid off almost 11,000 white-collar workers. American Motors idled 7,000 workers in one plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin, alone. In New Hampshire, a textile mill that had been in business since 1823 was scheduled to shut­ter. Maryland’s largest private employer, the four-mile-long Sparrows Point steel complex, began laying off thousands; 100,000 steel workers lost their jobs nationwide between the previous summer and the up­coming fall; in December 1974—Christmastime—185,000 blue-collar workers found themselves without work. Businesses and consumers preferred products made elsewhere: foreign car sales were up 20 per­cent, American cars down almost 13. The Economist said, “Capitalism is being tested everywhere. Many people believe it is dying.” It called the closing of 150 investment banks and securities dealers in the United States in recent weeks “some of the worst failures since the Great De­pression.” The National Association of Home Builders called the slump in its industry “far and away the worst since the Depression.”

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Since the Depression: a new household phrase.

It felt as if America did not even own itself. “Will Araby Bankrupt the World?” the January 25 Saturday Review cover asked. Rumor was that Saudis had bought up all the real estate in Beverly Hills. Arabs had bought us, yes, but they also hated us: in one page-turner selling out at airport book stores, Black Sunday, Palestinians had no trouble recruit­ing one of those sturdy patriotic heroes of 1973, a Vietnam prisoner of war, his brain too addled by torture to resist, to pilot an explosives-laden blimp into the Super Bowl; in another, The Gargoyle Conspir­acy, Arabs assassinate the secretary of state. (Time noted jocularly that the Arab-bashing thrillers might someday no longer be published, if the Arabs bought all the publishing companies.) Meanwhile, the real-life secretary of state, in a Christmastime interview in BusinessWeek, hinted that a military strike to seize Middle East oil fields outright might be im­minent. Then he left for a hat-in-hand tour of Arab capitals, as if making amends.

Gerald Ford, in his January 15 State of the Union address, was hardly more comforting: “I must say to you that the state of our Union is not good,” he said. No president had ever told the citizenry anything like that.

But Ronald Reagan as the answer? His preferred solution to the crisis—turning management of the economy even more over to private interests—didn’t sound right even to the conservative City of London gentlemen who edited the Economist. They opined that much of the blame for capitalism’s tests lay with “a concentration of money into the hands of a few big banks, even more than these giants know what to do with.”

In any event, with Ford tacking to the right, it was hard to see what room Reagan might have to maneuver. “Ford Lauded By Wall Street on Inflation,” read a headline about his speech to securities analysts who “generally applauded what they saw as President Ford’s renewed determination to tackle inflation, rather than recession, as the nation’s chief economic problem.” He gave speeches in which he said things like “We face a critical choice. . . . Shall we slide headlong into an economy whose vital decisions are made by politicians while the private sector dries up and shrivels away?” The major economic idea in his State of the Union message was a tax rebate of around one hundred dollars for the average American, which was just the sort of thing a President Reagan would be likely to propose.

“President Reagan”—that inconceivable phrase. Ronald Reagan, who was still defending Richard Nixon, and who said two weeks before Gerald Ford’s pardon that “the punishment of resignation is more than adequate for the crime.”

Ronald Reagan, who told CBS “I hope to devote my time to hitting the sawdust trail and preaching the gospel of free enterprise”—“the gos­pel,” like this was revealed truth or something.

This in a country where the most talked-about new bipartisan leg­islative proposal was soon to be Jacob Javits and Hubert Humphrey’s “Balanced Growth and Economic Planning Act,” which attempted to grow the country out of stagflation by setting up an Office of National Economic Planning to govern such heretofore unregulated parts of the economy as factory production, and which would submit six-year plans to Congress every twenty-four months. This might once have sounded like something out of the Soviet Union. But now—why not? One of Ford’s aides, who would go on to become vice chairman of Goldman Sachs, thought Ford should co-opt the idea as his own, as “a highly con­structive presidential initiative.” Intellectuals devoured the arguments of sociologist Daniel Bell, in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, “that, today, we in America are mov­ing away from a society based on a private-enterprise market system toward one in which the most important economic decisions will be made at the political level, in terms of consciously defined ‘goals’ and priorities.’ . . . A turn to non-capitalist modes of social thought . . . is the long-run historical tendency in Western society.”

If you enjoyed this excerpt, pre-order the full book here.

From Invisible Bridgeby Rick Perlstein. Copyright © 2014 by Rick Perlstein. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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