Our fourth branch of government is saving us

When Donald Trump appeared on a national television program and told “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker that he does not know whether he is compelled as president to uphold the Constitution, America was hit with an unforeseen and unprecedented question: Just how far gone are we as a country?

The answer is, pretty far.

To be certain, it didn’t begin with this man who is at least willing to state out loud his utterly fascist leanings and it is not the first time we have been in this much trouble. We have been in the midst of a hurricane of lawlessness for more than 50 years, going back at least to the Watergate scandal, when another Republican president, Richard Nixon, attempted to steal an election by ordering the break in and bugging of the opposition party, the Democrats, who were in the midst of running a candidate, George McGovern, against him for the presidency.

The lawlessness in the land went far beyond an office burglary in Washington D.C. A secret surveillance operation, COINTELPRO, (acronym for “Counter Intelligence Program”) had been established years earlier by the FBI to surveil and disrupt political organizations that J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the FBI, found to be subversive and unAmerican. The FBI did this in illegal coordination with the CIA, the NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, military intelligence operatives within all the uniformed services and local police forces that provided covert agents as infiltrators. The groups and individuals surveilled would come to include Martin Luther King, the Communist Party USA, civil rights organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panthers, anti-war groups such as Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), leftist groups such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), feminist organizations such as the National Organization for Women (NOW) and even environmental and animal rights groups. Phones were wiretapped, memberships were infiltrated by agents and informers, groups were disrupted using false reports in the media, false documents, false arrests and grand juries charged with investigating leaders and members of groups like the VVAW that led to trumped up indictments, imprisonment of leaders on false charges, and even the killing of radical leaders such as Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, shot dead in his bed during a raid on his Chicago apartment.

People I knew and I, myself, were wiretapped and followed by FBI and military intelligence agents. My FBI file alone is more than an inch thick, and I was never able to get my hands on files kept on me by military intelligence, the CIA and NSA. People I knew were arrested on false charges and imprisoned under inflated bail amounts. One person I knew, a major leader of the anti-war movement and a famed counterculture figure, was purposefully infected with Hepatitis C by a police department which arrested him just so they could falsely require a blood test that was not administered to any other arrestees.

That was just the Nixon administration.

In later years, more lawlessness infected our politics, including the Iran-Contra illegal operation under Ronald Reagan and the falsification of intelligence and outright lies that led us into the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Those two invasions would together cause the deaths of more than 7,000 members of the American military as well as countless insurgent combatants and civilians who were killed in wars we should have never waged in the first place.

While all this was going on, our politics at home was being infected by rhetoric weaponized by figures such as Newt Gingrich and movements within the Republican Party such as the Tea Party and right-wing Congressional groups such as the Freedom Caucus.

By the time Donald Trump descended the infamous golden escalator in 2015 and won office with the help of foreign actors such as Russian intelligence, this country had become inured to political scandal and lawlessness. Trump’s attempt to overthrow the election of 2020 could be looked upon as yet another Watergate or Iran Contra or the lie-fest that got us into Iraq and Afghanistan. In short, it was all of a piece, 50 years of political scandals piled one upon the other until they seem to have blocked out the sun.

How has our country survived this terrible storm of political lawlessness? Elected officials in the Congress and the judges and justices in our courts have imposed order on those who would strip our democracy of its meaning and function.

It happened when the Congress stood up to Nixon and, threatening impeachment, forced his resignation. But it didn’t happen when George W. Bush was forcing us with one lie after another into two wars we should never have waged. It didn’t happen when the Department of Justice attempted to investigate the corrupt first campaign of Donald Trump with the office of Special Counsel run by Robert Mueller. It didn’t happen when twice the House of Representatives brought articles of impeachment against Donald Trump and the Senate refused to convict. It didn’t happen when an out-of-control Supreme Court decided in U.S. v. Trump that this president, and indeed future presidents, have a virtually unlimited immunity from prosecution not just for official actions taken while serving, but for many actions taken after leaving office.

Still, there has been positive movement in our democracy.

On Monday, Robert Reich reported in his Substack that Fred Wertheimer, the former general counsel for the nonpartisan government watchdog Common Cause, gave a speech last week when he received the Paul H. Douglas Award for Ethics in Government for 2025. Just the fact that such an award still exists, and a man like Fred Wertheimer was there to receive it, is a hopeful sign for our country. Reich asked him if recent events with Trump have discouraged him. Here is how Reich described Wertheimer’s answer: “‘Discouraged?’ he said, almost surprised I asked. ‘This is my life. This is what I do.’”

Wertheimer took note in his speech of the 143 executive orders that have been issued by Donald Trump. But then he went on to report that “These executive orders have resulted in 222 legal challenges and at least 123 court rulings enjoining Administration actions, with preliminary injunctions and temporary restraining orders issued based on serious doubts about the legality of the Administration’s actions.”

This is a hopeful sign for our country. But it is not enough. As Wertheimer pointed out, the Trump administration’s response has been to attack judges and call for them to be impeached, attack the people who have filed lawsuits seeking restraint of Trump’s executive orders, and attempt to outright violate or otherwise ignore certain of the judges’ orders resulting from the lawsuits.

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The Congress as it is currently composed, with Republican majorities in both chambers, is a dead letter when it comes to restraining the outright undemocratic insanity of this president. Because this GOP-controlled Congress cannot be relied upon, the election of Democrats to the next Congress has become the top priority not just of Democrats, but of right-thinking Americans. I say “right-thinking” because recent polls have revealed how unpopular Trump and many of his policies have become. Trump’s and Musk’s attempts to disassemble the federal government are supported only by Republicans, but even their support is not fulsome across the board. People are not happy about canceling grants to come up with cures for cancer and heart disease and other ailments that touch so many American families. People like clean air and clean water and tend to oppose attempts to weaken laws which protect both. People are generally in favor of clean energy and against energy production that pollutes, such as coal-burning power plants. People are in favor of democratic principles enshrined in our Constitution such as equal rights under the law and the right to due process and birthright citizenship. People are boycotting Elon Musk’s Tesla cars to the point that the company’s stock price is in the tank. People are even protesting with their feet against companies such as Target which so quickly acquiesced to Trump’s demand that they cancel DEI programs that lead to a workforce more representative of the communities in which the stores are located.

And people are sufficiently unhappy with the direction Donald Trump wants to take the country that they have engaged in twice as many street protests against Trump and his policies than there were in the first 100 days of Trump’s first term in office. According to The Guardian, in the month of February alone, there were 2,085 protests. There are reports that protests at town halls held by Republican members of Congress have caused the Republican leadership to tell members to cancel town halls or restrict admission to supporters only.

A new ecosystem of news gathering and distribution has sprung up because people are unhappy with mainstream media outlets such as the Washington Post — which has caved to Trump under the ownership of Trump-suck-up Jeff Bezos — and the New York Times, which almost daily seems to come up with story headlines and reports that minimize Trump’s anti-democratic behavior and policies. People are subscribing to Substack columns and other online outlets that provide reports and analysis that fill in the blanks left by the fading and failing MSM. An entire world of podcasts and video reporting has sprung up to repair and replace cable and network news outlets that are increasingly seen as irrelevant to what people want and need.

All this should give us hope, but more is needed. Substack columnists like Robert Hubbell,Joyce Vance and Heather Cox Richardson are increasing their public appearances to speak publicly about how Donald Trump is damaging this country and our democracy. I have been invited to speak here in Milford, Pennsylvania, on May 14 at a meeting of a local activist group called Delaware Valley Action. The address is 315 Broad Street, and the time is 6:30 pm. My remarks will also be available on Zoom. I have decided that I will join my fellow Substack columnists in speaking out publicly, and I will accept any invitation I receive depending on my schedule and ability to travel to the venue.

The answer to lies is to speak the truth. The answer to repression is to stand up and take a stand. The answer to fear is courage. The answer to the attempted closing of American political life is taking to the streets. The answer to authoritarianism is political freedom. The answer to feeling alone is standing together.