The View from Right Field

Where Did All This Partisanship Come From?

I will assume most people will not say that it started with Donald Trump.  He certainly is bad, partisanship-wise,¹ but it didn’t start with him.  Some people might go back to Joe McCarthy or Richard Nixon,² but I’m thinking of something more recent.  Republicans might point to Ted Kennedy’s attacks on Robert Bork in 1986, when President Reagan nominated him to the Supreme Court.³  Democrats might point to attacks on Bill and Hillary Clinton in the 1990s (the “vast right-wing conspiracy”).  And so on.  But I am going to suggest something else.

Sometimes it is hard to remember how you felt about a particular event at the time because things that happened afterwards color your recollection of how you felt then.  Even reading contemporaneous news articles about something in the past will sometimes surprise you because you know what has happened since and the article doesn’t. 

52 Years Ago I Met a Future President

Actually, it was 52 years ago yesterday, July 10, 1968.  Here is a picture of me, a lot of other people, and Richard Nixon. 

I was one of a group of Young Republicans helping at a Nixon fundraiser.  After the picture, I shook President Nixon’s hand and said, “Thank you.”  He said, “No, thank you (for helping).”  A great man.  I am so happy I got to meet him.

Flying the Flag on the Fourth

The first thing I did when I got up on the Fourth was to get out the ladder and put up the flag.  We aren’t home on the Fourth of July very often, but this year we were.  (Surprise!)  And I figured it would be an important year to make sure the flag was up.  I was right.

There didn’t seem to be as many flags as I remembered in years when we have been home (or on Memorial Days, etc.), which I sort of expected.  A couple of people on my wife’s high school class Facebook group said they weren’t flying the flag this year because, well, you know.  Which was a viewpoint I expected and which was the reason I put ours up first thing Saturday morning.

Now Is the Time to Get Ready for the Election in November

Last weekend The Wall Street Journal had an article by Nicholas Persily, “It’s Not Too Late to Save the 2020 Election,” on things we need to do to avoid (minimize-?) problems next November.  Professor Persily listed nine things:

1. Provide more federal funding and support.
2. Ensure that schools remain open as polling places.
3. Keep voters from having to wait in line.
4. Bolster confidence in voting by mail.
5. Encourage election and postal officials to coordinate their efforts as soon as possible.
6. Insist that the big tech companies do their part.
7. Deploy tools to help predict voter turnout.
8. Anticipate problems with disinformation and cybersecurity.
9. Refrain from declaring a winner on election night.

Here are the key things I got from the article, with an Illinois perspective.

Here’s an Idea: Let’s Get Rid of Police Unions

This is an idea I’ve had for a long time, one that popped up again with the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota.  Other people have written about this in more detail recently (among others, see here), but it’s not just those who could be written off as anti-union right wingers anymore.  The Financial Times had a front-page story on the problem of police unions yesterday.¹

Among the purposes of unions are to protect the jobs of their members and to get them as much money as possible.  Part of the former is to make it hard to fire union members.  Which in the case of police unions means making it hard to fire police officers.  I’m all for police officers not being fired unfairly, but the way it seems to be working in too many cases these days, is that it is just too hard to fire police officers at all.  There are police officers that need to be fired, and police unions are making it too hard to do so. 

Figure Out How We Will Vote in November – Now!

How are we going to vote in November?  No, not who are we going to vote for.  Rather, what is the actual process of voting going to be?  Wisconsin had a disaster of an election in April.  The Democratic governor said he didn’t have authority to change the election date, but he waited until the week before the election to call the Republican-led legislature into special session – twice.   But the legislature and governor couldn’t agree on anything, and the legislature adjourned.  At that point, on the day before the election, the governor tried to delay in-person voting until June.  Republicans appealed to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which said the governor didn’t have the power to delay the election,¹ so voting went ahead on Tuesday.  At that point, things were so messed up there were only five polling places in the entire city of Milwaukee.  Stupid, just stupid.  (See here and here.)

While we can’t know for sure, there is a fair chance that in-person voting could be a problem for at least a significant portion of the population in November.  But even if it turns out that it isn’t, we need plan ahead.  Something we haven’t been doing, so far.

The “Silent Majority” Speech: Fifty Years On

Fifty years ago today, Richard Nixon gave his “Silent Majority” speech, one of his most famous speeches and source of his, almost certainly, most famous phrase.  Unlike presidents today, and before, President Nixon wrote the “Silent Majority” speech himself and came up with the phrase, “the silent majority,” himself.

For the speech itself, see here:

Evan Thomas, former Newsweek editor and best-selling author, notes that President Nixon’s approval rating went up from 52% to 68% after the speech.  For Mr. Thomas’s comments on the speech and more about President Nixon, listen to this podcast from the Richard Nixon Foundation.

For more on the Silent Majority speech, see Pat Buchanan, Nixon aide and speechwriter, here and this article/video from the Nixon Library and Museum. 

What’s More Important: Stormy Daniels or Nuclear Powers Fighting a War?

While official Washington and its media are focused on Michael Cohen’s testimony before Congress yesterday that Donald Trump is a liar and racist and was deeply involved in efforts to pay hush money to Story Daniels, on the other side of the world, two countries that have nuclear weapons are fighting a near-war against each other.  India is bombing Pakistan, and Pakistan is fighting back.

I remember, in 1998, when Pakistan finally developed a nuclear bomb.  India already had one, but now the two of them, countries which had fought each other four times in the prior 50 years, both had nuclear weapons.

Declaring a “National Emergency” to Build a Wall Is a Terrible Idea

President Trump has apparently decided to sign the budget bill and then declare a “national emergency” to build a wall on the border with Mexico.  I’ll be brief: This is an absolutely terrible idea.  Presidential power once stretched never returns to its prior limits.  A national emergency that lets President Trump build a wall, will let his successor do other things.  Even if you approve of the former, you may not approve of the latter.  And even if courts or Congress stop President Trump from doing this,¹ the mere fact that President Trump tried to use emergency powers in this way will be a precedent for future presidents to use their emergency powers in other ways.  This is a really bad idea.
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¹ It could be an interesting question as to who would have “standing” to challenge President Trump’s order in the courts.

Is Elizabeth Warren a Native American or an American Indian?

The answer, of course, is neither, as even Elizabeth Warren says now.  But what I found interesting about the Texas Bar registration card Senator Warren filled out in 1986 is not that she claimed be a race that she isn’t, but that she got the name wrong, at least to today’s standards.  Because she didn’t write “Native American.”  She wrote “American Indian.”  Which is I believe is now considered inappropriate and not sufficiently “woke.”¹

And which is yet another reason why it is so tiring to talk about issues today.  Not only do you have to get the answers right, you have to only use the most up-to-date terms when doing so.
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¹ I think that is the proper word, but I am not sure.  Because I definitely would not be considered sufficiently “woke.”