Mail Call
A Special Election, the judicial machinations regarding the January 6th trial and the Alabama Supreme Court’s IVF decision were easy and inviting subjects of opportunity for my Letters to the Editor.
The Special Election that was held on February 13th in the 3rd Congressional District of New York between Tom Suozzi and Mazi Pilip for the seat that had been held by the disgraced and expelled George Santos gave me an opportunity to be on the ground and not just looking through the window for a local political event that had national significance. For so many other times I’ve been a political junkie only looking on from a distance.
But when it came to this special election, it was different because I grew up in what’s now New York’s 3rd CD, my first job on Capitol Hill was as a legislative assistant for the congressman who represented large parts of that District, and, after working on Capitol Hill for seventeen years, I moved back to the area in 1994. With this perspective, I was able to gauge Suozzi’s claims of his being well-positioned to “fix this” when referring to Congress’s current dysfunction. I also worked for six years as the chief counsel to the Democrats on the Nassau County Legislature, allowing me to assess what kind of preparation that position afforded to Pilip who was the County Legislator running on the Republican line. So, all together, I was able to bring a sense of the local political dynamics as well as a feel for the texture of the candidates and their campaigns that eluded much of the national reporting on it. I also tried to bring these insights to Letters to the Editor that I sent to Newsday and The New York Times.
Submitted to Newsday on January 26, 2024
Sometimes, stories that appear to be unrelated are, in fact, tightly entwined. That’s the case when it comes to the current immigration crisis and County Legislator Mazi Pilip’s vote late last year to use excess Covid-19 funds for events like car shows and golf tournaments to commemorate Nassau County’s 125th anniversary instead of using some of that money for programs such as those to enhance public safety, youth programming and food pantries. Back then, she chose to do what her County Republican leaders wanted and voted for the razzle-dazzle celebrations.
Now, she is confronted with Donald Trump’s demand that Republicans in Congress vote against the emerging bi-partisan deal to strengthen security on our southern border. The Republican leaders of the House of Representatives are reportedly going to follow Trump’s directives. The question is whether Pilip will follow her pattern in the Nassau County Legislature, but, this time, tag along with the wishes of the extreme House Republican leadership or will she be willing to buck their absolutist demand and, instead, work for bi-partisan solutions to real problems. And the voters of the Third Congressional District have the right to hear her answer from her and not have it filtered through Republican party mouthpieces.
Submitted to The New York Times on February 19, 2024
When considering whether Tom Suozzi’s victory in the special election for New York’s 3rd Congressional District is a template for future Democratic victories in 2024, it’s important to keep in mind that candidate quality matters.
Suozzi had been a mayor, a two-term County Executive and three-term member of Congress. During his initial tenure in the House, he had taken a bi-partisan approach to dealing with immigration. Other Democratic candidates without a similar pre-campaign track record might well find it much more difficult to credibly parry intense Republican efforts to tie them to the migrant crisis.
By contrast, Suozzi’s opponent Mazi Pilip has been a Nassau County Legislator since only 2022. Voters whose only side-by-side comparison of Suozzi and Pilip was their one debate during the last week of the campaign could understandably have concluded that she’s not even close to being the most intelligent or articulate of that Legislature’s members.
So, before drawing broad stroke generalizations about the implications of the Suozzi victory for the general election of 2024, it would be best to keep in mind this uncomplicated thought: Tom Suozzi may have been the only Democrat interested in running who could have won the race, and Mazi Pilip may have been the only person running on the Republican line who could have lost it.
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Over these past weeks, my feelings about the prospects of Donald Trump’s being held accountable via the judicial system have ranged from “hopeful” to “trying to make lemonade out of a lemon.” And, in between, there was a pit stop for outright “despair,” like on the evening of February 28 when the Supreme Court gave notice that it would consider Trump’s claim of “presidential immunity” but not until April 22. On that night, I sent an e-mail to a Hamilton College friend which I ended with the following words:
“If I had any drawing expertise and a mind to put my feelings into a
cartoon, it would be of a tombstone on which would be the inscription:
“This is the day that Democracy died in America – February 28, 2024”
The following are two letters which show my range of feelings about the prospects for Trump’s January 6th accountability.
Submitted to The New York Times on February 6, 2024
Now that the three-judge panel of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals has unanimously ruled against Donald Trump’s broad claim of presidential immunity from criminal prosecution, Special Counsel Jack Smith is one step closer to bringing the January 6th case to trial. Once that trial begins, there will undoubtedly be a continuous flow of motions by the prosecution and the defense that will have the judge, jury and the nationwide public as their intended audiences.
But whether Trump is found guilty by the jury or held accountable, electorally or otherwise, by the American people may well depend on their perception, based on the evidence presented by Smith, that Trump’s actions or willful inactions regarding his centrality to the January 6th attack on the Capitol amounted to the enthusiastic words of Colonel Jessup in A Few Good Men: “You’re damn right I ordered the Code Red…I’d do it again.”
Submitted to The New York Times on March 1, 2024
The Supreme Court’s decision to consider Donald Trump’s claim of presidential immunity but to also delay the hearing on it until April 22 reveals an outrageous inclination by some of the Supreme Court’s members to play on “Team Trump.” However, this turn of events could end up being an election turnout motivator for the Democrats similar to the Dobbs decision on reproductive rights.
How? Assume the Court waits until the end of June to announce its decision, but, at that time, a majority rejects Trump’s immunity claim. Further, assume that these delays put the January 6th trial off until after the election. Finally, assume that during the campaign through to election day Trump continues to assert his right to be immune from prosecution for crimes committed while President.
In this context, including the added weight of a Court decision rejecting Trump’s position, presidential immunity has the potential for being a high -rofile issue which the Democrats can posit in the following way: “This election is between someone who will not hide behind the presidency as a shield that gives him the right to commit crimes and someone who says he has the right as president to commit crimes, including murder, without any judicial accountability.” Aside from the MAGA base, few voters are likely to side with Trump on this issue.
Also, within the context of congressional campaigns, this question will put Republican candidates in a bind. If they disagree with Trump’s position, they will put themselves on his wrong and vengeful side. But if they agree with Trump on this question, they will put their own elections in jeopardy.
Therefore, while very much a Plan B or Plan C compared to the Supreme Court’s proper and expeditious consideration of Trump’s immunity claim, the Court, as with Dobbs, may have set the stage for victories for Joe Biden and the congressional Democrats this coming November.
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The Alabama Supreme Court’s decision that classified frozen embryos as people was horrifying to those Americans already concerned about the implications of the Dobbs decision for the range of issues related to reproductive rights, marriage equality and gender identity. Ironically, for another group of people who are just fine with Dobbs’ leading to further restrictions or retrenchments in those areas, the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision set off political alarm bells because they recognize that being on the “wrong side” of in vitro fertilization (IVF) also puts them on the wrong side of what many people have come to accept as a non-traditional yet very real path to motherhood and parenthood. The following letter which I submitted to The Washington Post raised another set of “logical but politically unpalatable” issues that the proponents of Dobbs also should fear could alienate some of their base supporters.
Submitted to The Washington Post on February 21, 2024
In its ruling that frozen embryos are people and that someone can be held liable for destroying them, the Alabama Supreme Court stated it had long held that “unborn children are children” which affords them protection under Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act and that the statute “applies to all children, born and unborn, without limitation.”
With that same rationale, how would that Court subsequently rule in actions that might be brought under Alabama’s Reckless Endangerment Law that states “A person commits the crime of reckless endangerment if he recklessly engages in conduct which creates a substantial risk of serious physical injury to another person” when a woman is accused of smoking while pregnant. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found that smoking “can cause tissue damage in the unborn baby, particularly in the lung and brain” and the National Institute on Drug Abuse has found that smoking can result in “increased risk of still birth [and]…miscarriage. Logically, if here the Court doesn’t offer similar protections to a fetus and doesn’t find the mother similarly at fault, then it reveals that the Court’s actual goal is to attack a woman’s reproductive rights and not to protect the health and welfare of children, as it defines that word.
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Is an endorsement of Donald Trump one bridge too far for Nikki Haley? That’s the question that I raised in a Letter to the Editor of The New York Times that was printed in The Times March 8th edition. But since, technically speaking, The Times now owns that letter, I can’t reprint it here. And since The Times made only the most minimal of edits, I can’t in good faith publish here the original version as “the author’s cut.” But if you go to The New York Times “opinion” section for March 8th and then click on to the “letters” subsection, you can see the letter…as long as you can get beyond The Times “paywall.”