TOMORROW

It’s after 10PM on the night before the election. The clock is ticking. In just  a few hours the polls will be open. And then, suddenly, it will all be over.

For more than a year, our airwaves and digitation have been filled with blow by blow descriptions of the race for the presidency of the United States of America. The drama, the blistering criticisms, the soaring eloquence, the name calling, the polling data, the debates and pleas and solicitations and robo phone calls have sucked up all the oxygen in our rooms and left us numb.

Soon it will be over. Like the Super Bowl, the World Series, the Masters, the Stanley Cup. There will be winners and losers. Delight and despair.

And soon, if not tomorrow, there will be a painful, lumbering, necessary and traditional acquiescence in the result. The victorious will be gracious, the defeated will be reconciled.

If you have been reading these blogs, you know that the old judge has been rooting for Donald Trump. He has had his misgivings, to be sure, but he came around mostly because of concern for the kind of a Supreme Court the candidates envisioned.

And you know that this old blogger is the patriarch of a large family, some forty-two people in all, scattered between Savannah and Los Angeles, who lay claim to graduate and undergraduate degrees from no fewer than sixteen colleges and universities.

It is hardly a monolithic crowd. Opinions about politics are as diverse as academic loyalties.

My beloved spouse and mentor urges me to downplay the panorama of political opinion. Don’t rock the boat. Don’t risk alienation of loved ones. Elections aren’t important enough to sacrifice the loyalty of blood and bed.

So tomorrow, my vote will be cancelled by children and grandchildren and I will strive to understand how they see the world differently than I do.

Not an easy task for an old man who thinks he has learned a lot in nearly nine decades. Not easy for an old political war horse who believes that voting is a sacred obligation to understand  those who refuse to exercise their franchise or who eschew the hard choice between the major candidates.

Still, if you listen, there is much to hear. My granddaughter Clare, for instance. She is in Ireland, traveling, learning, experiencing life after earning her degree from the University of Michigan.

She writes a blog. Beautifully. Her words reveal sensitivity, understanding, appreciation. She writes about her parents in words that show how well she knows them and their commitment to each other.

And now she writes about Hillary. Not as a student of history, nor as a political pundit, but as an intelligent, ambitious and confident young woman who can empathize with a female climbing the ladder of political leadership so long reserved to men only.

There is, of course, an element of truth in Clare’s description of the woman she calls “Madam.” and there is no need for her to ruminate about the dark side. She is, after all, a supporter and a voter. If she can cheer for Jim Harbaugh and the Wolverines in good conscience, she can surely root for Hillary Rodham Clinton without apology.

For me it is enough to say that I am immensely proud of my granddaughter, even as I realize that she is cancelling out my vote for President. I can comfort myself in the hope that when she has piled up enough years and tallied up enough hopes and disappointments, she may inch a little closer to her grandfather’s political outlook.

In the meantime, I urge you to read her blog and see if you don’t agree that Clare is a special and talented writer and a credit to her parents and the whole Brennan clan.

Here is the link:

https://cmbrennan14.wordpress.com

BACK TO COLLEGE

Every four years, we Americans get reminded of what and who we are.

We go back to college. But we never graduate. Forty-eight hours from now we will be watching massive scoreboards on our televisions tracking the status of the Electoral College.

Most Americans can’t tell you what the Electoral College is, how it works, or why we have it.

Very simply, the Electoral College is the way we choose the President of the United States. The big maps on TV are divided between red states and blue states. Where did that come from?

From the very first days of our nation; indeed even before we were a nation; there was and still is a split between the big states and the small states. The difference between big and small states matters because a state is a state, no matter how big or small.

We are also split by geography, topography, weather, wealth and location.

And the states are sovereign entities, not mere departments of a national government. The Founders of our nation created a national legislature which has two Houses: the lower house represents the people, the Senate represents the States. Both have to agree on every law.

That same compromise exists in the Electoral College. Each state has a number of votes equal to its congressional delegation. Add its two Senators to the number of its Congressmen and you get the state’s electoral votes.

So the voting for President is not just a matter of counting the total number of votes for each candidate, nor is it a matter of counting the total number of states won by each candidate.

The TV commentators will talk a lot about ‘swing’ states. That is because the vote in those states is hard to predict. Many states are easy to predict. It is a foregone conclusion that New York and California will vote for the Democratic candidate.

How do we know? Just because they always do. This is a big country. People in different States eat different food, cheer for different teams, speak in different dialects, and vote for different candidates. And this despite the leveling effect of TV, the Internet, and the free movement of our people.

Al Gore won the popular vote, but George Bush won the White House. Two other candidates who got ‘gored’ were Samuel Tilden in 1876 and Grover Cleveland in 1888.

Forty eight of the fifty states, and the District of Columbia, award their electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis. Only Maine and Nebraska divide their presidential votes proportionally.

There have been many efforts to change the system. Since the Electoral College is built into our Constitution, it will take a constitutional amendment to change it. Not an easy thing to do.

Some well meaning folks have tried to solve the problem another way. National Popular Vote, Inc. is an organization which has been trying to get states to agree to cast their electoral votes for the candidate who wins the nationwide popular vote. They would not need every state to agree; only states with enough electoral votes to form a majority of the Electoral College; 269 electoral votes.

The web site nationalpopularvote.com tells us:

“The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in the entire U.S. It has been enacted into law in 11 states with 165 electoral votes, and will take effect when enacted by states with 105 more. The bill has passed one chamber in 12 additional states with 96 electoral votes.  Most recently, the bill was passed by a bipartisan 40–16 vote in the Republican-controlled Arizona House, 28–18 in Republican-controlled Oklahoma Senate, 57–4 in Republican-controlled New York Senate, and 37–21 in Democratic-controlled Oregon House.” 

National Popular Vote, Inc. has been around a dozen years. Their progress is slow, but they are persevering. I believe it was New Jersey Chief Justice Arthur Vanderbilt who observed during his state’s historic 1947 convention, “constitutional reform is no sport for the short winded.”

Indeed, it isn’t. But the quadrennial drama of every leap year gives change a little push. Maybe this time the mountain will move a little more.

COMEY CONUNDRUM

At 935 Pennsylvania Ave, just down the street from the White House, there is a massive, block long, government building, housing 2,800,876 square feet of offices. It is the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

It is the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

J. Edgar Hoover was employed at the Department of Justice in 1917, during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. In 1924, Hoover was named Director of Investigations in the Department. That office was reorganized in 1935 as the Federal Bureau of Investigation with Hoover as its founding Director. Hoover served under 10 Presidents,  Democrats Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson and Republicans Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Eisenhower, and Nixon. He died in 1972 after 55 years in the Department of Justice.

Hoover was an institution in America. His name was synonymous with truth, integrity and justice. He was the poster boy for law and order.

True to the old adage about the corrupting nature of power, Hoover extended the reach of the FBI into politics.

Harry Truman had this to say about the Director, “We want no Gestapo or secret police. The FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail. J. Edgar Hoover would give his right eye to take over, and all congressmen and senators are afraid of him." 

Hoover had a penchant for cloak and dagger politics. Under his direction the Bureau maintained extensive files on a number of people who were never implicated in any criminal activity. Martin Luther King comes immediately to mind.

In the 41 years between the death of J. Edgar Hoover and the appointment of James Comey, eleven men served as the Director of the FBI, with tenure ranging from 8 days to 12 years.

The appointment of James Comey by President Obama was hailed as a landmark. Comey’s reputation for integrity, non partisanship, and professionalism was spotless, and there was more than a little speculation that his tenure as Director would mean a new and long lasting revival of the Hooverian prestige and influence of the Bureau both in the nation’s capital and around the country.

That expectation was undercut on July 5, 2016, just five days after former President Bill Clinton met privately with Attorney General Loretta Lynch, when Director Comey made a public statement to the effect that ‘no responsible Attorney General would seek an indictment of Hillary Clinton' despite a recitation of her many careless and questionable email practices.

Twenty days later, Mrs. Clinton was nominated for the office of President by the Democratic Party.

No surprise, the Republicans howled. Comey was summoned by Congress and grilled about his decision. He stood his ground, despite conceding that Mrs. Clinton had lied to the FBI on several points.

As Summer wore on, rumors circulated that there was discontent at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue. The workhorse agents who read emails, interviewed witnesses and asked questions were reputed to have been uncomfortable with their boss’s public statements.

Then the other shoe was dropped. Director Comey wrote members of the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees informing them that emails uncovered in an investigation of former Congressman Anthony Weiner may bear on the closed Clinton investigation.

And so the FBI is taking another look.

In the blink of an eye, FBI Director Comey’s image among Democrats has morphed from hero to goat. And among Republicans, just the opposite.

My homely analogy compares Director Comey’s switcharoo to a basketball referee whose call against the Home team results in a chorus of boos and cat calls. Within minutes he whistles down a foul by the Visitors. It’s known as compensatory refereeing.

It’s a fault particularly noticeable in officials who are proud of their impartiality and sensitive to criticism. 

GAYLORD SPEECH

(This blog is far too long, but I am publishing it because of many requests)

In just over five hundred hours from now, the people of the United States will be stepping behind the curtain to vote for President of the United States.

I have to say that this is the … the strangest election in my life time.

It really is unusual. Driving over here from Harbor Springs, I saw a bumper sticker…. with no name on it.

Just a box with an  “X” in it. Then, in red letters, it said “NONE OF THE ABOVE”

It really is the strangest election in my lifetime, and I have to tell you that I am a very, very old man.

I was curled up on my mother’s womb in 1928 when Herbert Hoover defeated Al Smith.

It was the only time my father ever voted for a Democrat. Of course, he denied it. He said he didn’t vote for a Democrat. He said he voted for a Catholic.

I got my first experience in grass roots politics in 1936. It was literally grass roots. I wrestled a kid in my neighborhood on the front lawn. He was for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and I was for Alf Landon.

That was a very long time ago. There was no television, there were no computers, no Face Book. My grandmother’s canary was the only thing that tweeted. The Supreme Court was still trying to protect the Constitution from the New Deal.

Too bad Alf Landon didn’t win. The first thing Roosevelt did in 1937 was to try to pack the Supreme Court with six new justices. Congress defeated the Judiciary Reorganization Bill of 1937, but it wasn’t long before FDR was able to make his first Supreme Court appointment.

He said he wanted a “thumping evangelical New Dealer” and he found  one in Hugo Black, a Senator from Alabama.

Over the next twelve years, Roosevelt appointed seven more thumping, evangelical New Deal Judges, and the Supreme Court was magically and permanently converted into a political arm of the White House.

Today, we have Justices like Ruth Bader Ginsburg who presided over a gay wedding while the court was still hearing the debates about gay marriage and who openly declared her partisanship in the presidential election.

For more than seventy-five years, the Supreme Court of the United States has usurped the sovereignty of the American people by inventing what they call “constitutional law.” to advance their political agenda.

There are only two problems with ‘constitutional law’:

It isn’t constitutional and it isn’t law.

The Constitution says in plain English that IT is the Supreme Law of the land.  The Constitution is the law. The plain words of the Constitution. The plain words that the people who ratified the Constitution and its Amendments used when they adopted it and when they amended it.

The whole idea of a written constitution is to protect the law from the lawyers. It is written in the language used by ordinary people. It says what it means and it means what it says. Nothing less and nothing more.

The idea that nine unelected life time Justices of the Supreme Court can invent new civil rights that nobody ever dreamed of when the Constitution was adopted or amended is not only preposterous: it is a deliberate assault on the Supreme Law of the Land.

It is a criminal attack on the  sovereignty and the liberty of the American people.

You cannot have government of the people, by the people and for the people if the words the people adopt and ratify are twisted and ignored and re-defined and contorted to mean what nine self appointed arbiters of national culture want them to say.

My friends, it is time for the American people to stand up and say “We have had enough.” Indeed, we have had more than enough. We have had far too much judge made law in the United States and it is high time we take back the Supreme Court and confine it to its constitutional duty of deciding cases and controversies.

When the Supreme Court decided, in 1857, that an emancipated black man named Dred Scot could not be a citizen, Abraham Lincoln made it crystal clear that the Supreme Court does not have the power to make laws.

Supreme Court decisions are only binding on the parties to a case. They are not the law of the land, they are the law of the case, and they only affect similar cases as long as the personnel on the Supreme Court remains the same.

In 1890 the Supreme Court decided that racial segregation was constitutional. In 1954 that decision was overruled. It took sixty four years; but it happened.

You and I have come here this evening to express our support for the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death.

We are here tonight because in1973 the United States Supreme Court rendered an opinion in the case of Roe V Wade to the effect that women have a constitutional right to a medically assisted abortion.

That opinion has been roundly criticized by legal experts and scholars for four decades. That opinion was based on a so called right of privacy which the court admitted is nowhere to be found in the words of the constitution or the bill of rights. In his dissenting opinion, Mr. Justice Byron White called the majority opinion a raw abuse of judicial power.

My friends, whatever else is going to be decided on November 8, the impact of this election on the future of the Supreme Court must be our primary concern.

In addition to the vacancy created by the death of Antonin Scalia, the seats occupied by Clinton appointees Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer will almost certainly be vacated in the next eight years, as will the seat held by the infamous swing voter appointed by Ronald Reagan, Anthony Kennedy.

If the American people elect a President who sees it as his duty to appoint Justices who will abide by the plain words of the Constitution, there is every possibility that the decision in Roe versus Wade will, eventually, be reversed.

The talking heads on television and elsewhere like to tell us that abortion is a social issue. Social issue. That’s a nice, gentle way to approach it. Sort of like which fork to use for the salad, or whether you should take off your hat in an elevator.

My friends, There’s nothing social about abortion. It is an evil curse on civilized mankind. And the evil visited upon our nation by Roe V Wade is every bit as heinous and immoral and unconscionable as slavery and Jim Crow.

Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was a eugenicist. That means she was a student and an advocate of eugenics. Very simply, eugenics is the science of improving the human race by breeding stronger, smarter, more beautiful people.

Margaret Sanger argued in favor of abortion to eliminate poor people, ignorant people, ugly people. All those unfortunate men and women she claimed had “bad genes.”

People who were, in her eyes, condemned to be losers. The peasants. The underclass.  Especially people of African descent. Especially people with dark skin.

Her followers in the abortion industry today still honor Margaret Sanger, and despite all their pious talk about a woman’s reproductive health, they are still hell bent on trying to improve the breed of humanity.

It is no coincidence that most abortion clinics are located in the inner cities of our nation. Black women are five times as likely to have an abortion than white women.

In New York City more black babies are aborted than are born alive. Nearly two thousand black babies are killed in America every single day. Two thousand. Every single day. Those “Black Lives Matter” Those “Babies Lives Matter.”

Abortion is even more than a moral or legal issue. It is a political issue. In fact it is the most divisive, emotional political issue in America. It divides our nation as surely and as bitterly as the question of slavery that led to the civil war.

In the forty years since Roe V. Wade, over 60 million Americans have been denied the right to be born. Think of what that means to our country. Sixty million people. More than the combined populations of California and New York.

Sixty million people under the age of 43. Sixty million Americans who will never work or save or spend. Sixty million Americans who will never pursue happiness in this great land of the free and home of the brave. Sixty million Americans who will never go to college, buy a house, get married, or have children. Sixty million Americans who will never vote or serve their country in uniform.

I began these remarks tonight by suggesting that we Americans have a Hobson’s choice in the Presidential election. Surely the bitterness and scorn which mars our political rhetoric would seem to justify the conclusion that both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are scoundrels unworthy of the highest office in our nation.

But the plain, undeniable fact is that they are divided on the crucial issue of abortion. Mrs. Clinton would continue her husband’s preference for activist liberal Supreme Court Justices. Mr. Trump has declared his intention to appoint Justices in the tradition of Antonin Scalia.

In 1860 the newly organized Republican Party promised to abolish slavery.

It was also a bitterly contested election. The Democrats hated Lincoln so much that his life was threatened. He had to sneak into Washington wearing a disguise.

The election of 2016 is perhaps the most bitter and divisive since the Civil War. But for those of us who are pro life, the decision is clear. The Republican Party was the Party of abolition in 1860 and the Republican Party is the Party of Life in 2016.

We will vote for Donald Trump. Not because we like him. We don’t. Not because he is a role model for our children and grandchildren. He isn’t. Not because he is some great successful, charismatic leader who promises to make America great again. That remains to be seen.

We will vote for Donald Trump for one reason and one reason only: because he has heard what we are saying; because he has picked up the pro life banner; because he is committed to the cause of the unborn.

We will vote for Donald Trump and we will ask Almighty God to inspire him to support and defend our nation’s Constitution and to appoint Supreme Court Justices who will restore the Constitution as the Supreme Law of the Land.  

We will vote for Donald Trump because black lives and white lives, and babies lives and old people’s lives and every human life in this nation and on this planet matter. They matter to the beneficent Creator whose infinite love has given us this home.

We will vote for Donald Trump and we will leave the outcome to the same Almighty God in whom we Americans have always placed our trust.

We will leave the outcome to the mighty voice of God’s People on November eighth.

May God bless each of us, and may God bless the United States of America.