The New Colossus

Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.

– Rep. John Lewis

In the April 17, 2017, issue of The New Yorker, legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin wrote an editorial about the influence of Leonard Leo, the executive vice-president of the Federalist Society.  Leo’s work serves as a pipeline for conservative law graduates aspiring to the bench—e.g. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.  Today, Justice Anthony Kennedy, 81, announced his retirement, opening up a second appointment for President Trump.

Of Leo, Toobin writes, “Leo, who is fifty-one, has neither held government office nor taught in a law school. He has written little and has given few speeches. He is not, technically speaking, even a lobbyist. Leo is, rather, a convener and a networker, and he has met and cultivated almost every important Republican lawyer in more than a generation.”

So, he’s like most recruiters… a salesperson with no clue or regard for the actual needs of the job posting.

Aside from the stated mission of the Federalist Society, “that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to our Constitution”, the name itself betrays ignorance as to what Federalism is, and was.  The founder of the Federalist Party, Alexander Hamilton, and his associate Thomas Jefferson, weren’t merely for limited government and a literal-minded reading of the Constitution.  They and James Madison, whose silhouette imbues the blog-ish looking website of the organization with some kind of perceived credibility, wanted in fact to expand the Bill of Rights and make it applicable to states as well.  That would constitute an expansion of governmental protections… but never mind.  I’ll come back to Leo and his Lugubrious Lack of Legal Lucidity.

While I have seen my share of narrow-minded racists, growing up in North Dakota in the 1970’s and 1980’s (a time when the state routinely elected party members of the Democratic Farmer’s League to protect small agriculture interests), I have never witnessed the horrors of internment camps until recently.

I live in Dallas-Ft. Worth, in the state currently making headlines for several Immigration & Customs Enforcement detention centers that have detained children apart from their parents.  ICE has seemingly done everything it possibly can to earn comparisons to the Gestapo.  And Leo’s pick, Justice Gorsuch, recently delivered them a victory by affirming the President’s unchecked authority to deem entire classes of aliens inadmissible under 8 USC §1182(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

In the past two days, the Supreme Court has left many Americans in a daze.  As a first-generation immigrant of Indian origin, it left me in a daze.  But thank god for Leo’s, and Trump’s, inattentiveness to detail.  In that 5-4 opinion in Trump v. Hawaii, 585 U.S., upholding the Executive Order colloquially known as “the travel ban”, Chief Justice John Roberts took the opportunity to overturn Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214.  Roberts wrote, “The forcible relocation of U.S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful and outside the scope of presidential authority.”

The Court further opined on Trump’s executive order, “We express no view on the soundness of the policy.”

Here’s a question for Leonard Leo and his fellow law graduates who are neither lawyers, nor educators, nor consultants, nor have any other kind of practical experience informing their view of civics:  Why are you concerned with a rigid interpretation of law in a nation that enshrined the malleability of law in Article III and Article V of the very document you claim (albeit with not a lick of academic or practical authority) to cherish?

I understand that by appealing to the racism inherent in President Trump’s base, Leonard Leo has found an avenue for sending more and more candidates to the Federal bench, but to what end?  I understand racism is an end unto itself only for the ignorant but, despite his lack of experience at, well, anything, I don’t think a power broker such as Leonard Leo aims so low as to aspire to have a nation of freewheeling bigots who convey no foreseeable economic benefit.

That said, our country is run by a third-rate businessman who lost a billion dollars and bankrupted six companies, thus getting rejected by every major bank in the U.S., in the middle of American history’s most insane real estate boom at a time when banks would lend money to a blind dog.  I suppose it makes sense that Leo finds his soul mate in Trump.  When Larry Summers and George F. Will won’t touch the steaming pile of shit that Leo has no problem burying himself in face first, that’s saying something.

This is where, I think, his imagination and the imagination of Libertarians and of conservatives in general hits a brick wall: They can’t think past themselves.   Those who can, absolutely terrify them.  And until this afternoon, I couldn’t think past myself.  This brings me to the photograph.

As a writer who lives inside his own head, and in part due to a back injury, I spend as little time as possible wandering stores and malls.  After the announcement of Kennedy’s retirement, reminded of another Justice (Souter) and his prescient warning about the dangers of civic ignorance, I receded even further into myself, my family, and my work.  But as luck would have it, I had to replace the power supply to my wife’s connection to the world.   So off to the mall I went.

As I cut through Forever 21 (which really needs to pay attention to its customer base and re-brand itself Forever 12), and across to the One-Third Of The Gross National Product Store, I saw many faces… Asian, Middle Eastern, black, white, brown… many cultures, styles.  Glued to our glowing screens 24/7 its easy to forget that there’s a real social network out there.

Take a look at that photograph.  Take a closer look.  What Leonard Leo and his kind seem to want is for one last whiff of power before the world, and really the cosmos (Sagan’s “fraction of a dot” comes to mind), forgets them forever.  Rather than build a legacy to be shared and appreciated by all, they would exhaust our resources, destroy our freedoms, burn America to the ground, and leave us with nothing.  But America isn’t a place.  It’s not a piece of dirt.  And it’s not, as much as I hail the Constitution as one of the most brilliant governing documents ever written, a piece of paper.  America is an idea.  Ideas, like scientific theories (another concept that seems to be outside the radical Right’s grasp), adapt and get better.

If Leo and Trump insist on burning this America to the ground, there is an entire generation of kids of all races, national origins, genders, orientations, beliefs, attitudes, ready to bury the ashes and build a better America atop them.  The same people who whined for eight plus years about political correctness, panicked, now call for civility.

Relax, Leo.  Those aren’t pitchforks.  They’re shovels…

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
MOTHER OF EXILES. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

– “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus