Justice Department

2020 Election, Justice Department, Trump

Corrupted Justice…

Posted on by mjohnson

During the administration of President Warren G. Harding – until recently generally regarded as the most corrupt presidential administration in modern times – the attorney general was a thoroughly amoral political hack. His name was Harry Daugherty. 

Attorney General Harry Daugherty (left) with his friend President Warren Harding.

Daugherty was a small-time Ohio politician, never particularly successful in his own political life, but skilled at picking his friends and doubly skilled at using his position to advance his own interests. Daugherty became a bosom pal and personal lawyer of then-Senator Harding, helped engineer Harding’s surprising nomination as the Republican presidential candidate in 1920 and then managed a successful national campaign. As a reward, and because Harding was a singularly bad judge of character, Daugherty became attorney general.

There was some grumbling, even from Republicans, when Daugherty populated the U.S. Justice Department with a collection of cronies and grifters from Ohio. The press dubbed them “the Ohio gang,” and for a few years these shysters ran a series of scams to enrich themselves. (Meanwhile over at the Interior Department a corrupt cabinet member was selling government oil leases in order to enrich himself. Some remember that as “the Teapot Dome scandal.”)

Daugherty’s Ohio gang sold permits allowing exemptions from prohibition laws. They violated a law that governed the screening of prize fight films. They ran a racket to profit from property that had been confiscated from enemy aliens during World War I. And they went after their political enemies. 

In 1924 – Harding died in 1923 and Calvin Coolidge became president – Daugherty’s corruption was openly flouted in Washington and a handful of senators, including Idaho’s William E. Borah, demanded an investigation. Imagine that: A Republican senator demanding an investigation of a Republican administration. 

The leadership of the Senate’s investigation fell to a junior senator from Montana, a Democrat by the name of Burton K. Wheeler. Wheeler had been a righteous U.S. attorney before winning a Senate election in 1922. He insisted that the Justice Department had been corrupted and campaigned on launching an investigation. 

Senators William E. Borah, an Idaho Republican, and Burton K. Wheeler, a Montana Democrat, in 1924 when they worked together to hold a corrupt attorney general accountable.

Upon learning that Wheeler intended to call witnesses and probe alleged improprieties, Daugherty struck. FBI agents were dispatched to Montana to dig up dirt on Wheeler, the Republican National Committee sent its own investigators for the same purpose and a compliant U.S. attorney convened a grand jury to hear “evidence” of Wheeler’s own alleged corruption. The evidence produced was misrepresented or entirely manufactured, but Wheeler was nevertheless framed, indicted and labeled a crook by the very people he was seeking to hold to account.

Wheeler was eventually exonerated by a Montana jury and a Senate investigation led by Borah concluded that he had done nothing improper. Daugherty was ultimately forced to resign as attorney general – Borah again led the charge – and he evaded conviction on corruption charges when one of twelve jurors of held out against a guilty verdict. 

A senior justice department official who witnessed the entire sordid affair later said that Daugherty purposely set out, using political appointees loyal to him, to bring an indictment against a United States senator before that senator could expose Daugherty’s own corruption. 

The episode – improper use of the FBI, political intimidation, trumped up charges, politicization of the Justice Department, corrupt activity by an attorney general – stands as one of the worst examples in American political history of the department of the federal government charged with upholding the law doing precisely the opposite. The stench lasted for years.

Harry Daugherty is hardly alone in paving a trail of personal and organizational corruption at the Justice Department. Richard Nixon’s one-time attorney general John Mitchell, as another example, was convicted for his role in the Watergate affair and Mitchell’s tenure at the Justice Department was marked by profound politicization of the department. There were howls of Republican protest when Barack Obama’s attorney general held a highly questionable conversation with Bill Clinton during the 2016 campaign, while his wife activities were under investigation. 

Yet, not since John Mitchell, or even since Harry Daugherty have we seen the extraordinary level of Justice Department political game playing that we now see daily under Trump attorney general William Barr. And what makes Barr’s tenure so remarkable is that the political perversion of his department is happening in plain sight, driven by a vindictive president who now clearly believes there are no limits to his actions.  

“Congratulations to Attorney General Bill Barr for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control,” Trump Tweeted this week when the Justice Department changed course dramatically and in unprecedented fashion overruled federal prosecutors in a case involving Trump pal Roger Stone, the self-proclaimed Nixon-era sleaze merchant and dirty trickster. Stone, of course, was convicted of seven felonies, including witness intimidation and lying to Congress for his role in facilitating Russian interference in the 2016 election. Essentially the president is interceding with his attorney general to help a guy who lied for him. 

Four career prosecutors resigned from the case in protest, with one leaving the department entirely. Trump subsequently attacked the prosecutors and the federal judge who is scheduled to sentence Stone this month. Meanwhile, the president has encouraged discipline against the decorated officer who provided damaging testimony about Trump’s Ukrainian shakedown and the attorney general has moved out federal prosecutors who haven’t been sufficiently political subservient for his taste. 

Trump has so wildy succeeded – now with Barr’s help – in destroying the norms of presidential conduct that this kind of abnormal behavior seems to many to be OK. “What normalization does,” says Jason Stanley, author of a frightening little book called How Fascism Works, “is to transform the morally extraordinary into the ordinary. It makes us able to tolerate what was once intolerable by making it seem as if this is the way things have always been.” 

“What if a regime, for example, used a dismal us-versus-them divide in national politics to destroy faith in institutions capable of containing its power – elections, an independent judiciary, the public forum – thereby eliminating checks on its own self-enriching schemes?” – From The Guardian’s review of “How Fascism Works.”

But it is not the way things have always been or should be. And a toleration of the intolerable is deadly to democracy. As Harry Daugherty’s biographer wrote of another corrupt attorney general, he “belongs to that large and growing number of American leaders who, in sacrificing principle to personal gain, have failed the American people.” That is already being said of Barr.

Trump is unchained now. He’ll certainly pardon Stone and others convicted of serious crimes and who have covered for him. The extremely partisan politicians – Republicans like Idaho’s Jim Risch and Mike Crapo, for instance – who sanction this intolerable behavior may not believe it, but they are quietly and effectively serving as grave diggers for the fragile American experiment in democracy. 

That the president and his enablers have assaulted a broad array of democratic norms is a feature of the last three years. It got worse – much worse – this week. 

—–0—–

Further reading:

  • Yale philosopher Jason Stanley on How Fascism Works.
  • Attorney General William Barr appeared to push back against the president’s efforts to intercede in individual cases before the Justice Department – or maybe it was just a CYA move. Either way Barr has had, as Ben Parker writes, a disastrous first year as AG.
  • As I have noted before some of the best journalism these days is appearing in The Atlantic and among the magazine’s best writers on politics is McKay Coppins. He has a haunting new piece on plans by the Trump campaign to spend vast sums of money on a sophisticated disinformation campaign. Read his piece here or listen to Terry Gross’s interveiw with Coppins here.
  • And speaking of The Atlantic, here’s more from David Frum on Trump’s attorney general.
  • And…finally I just watched the stunning documentary that recently won this year’s Academy Award. It’s called “American Factory” and it goes some distance to explain both what has happened to the American manufacturing industry and our politics. Prepare to be informed and shocked. The film is streaming on Netflix.
Egan, Idaho Politics, Judiciary, Justice Department, Santorum, Vice Presidents

A New Idaho Judge

Posted on by christian

It would be difficult to overstate the importance to Idaho of the various political and judicial decisions that will be made over the next few months at the White House, at the Justice Department, and in the United States Senate. These decisions will be made almost entirely behind closed doors. We’ll likely have to speculate about why the decisions that we eventually hear about were made and who influenced them. Lots of politics, partisan and personal, will be involved. Chances are some deals will be cut. In the end, the decisions will impact the state – and arguably all of its residents – for a generation.

As Joe Biden might say – nominating and confirming a federal judge is a pretty big deal.

LodgeLast week long-time U.S. District Judge Edward Lodge told President Obama and the Idaho Congressional delegation of his decision to assume “senior status” as a federal judge. That move allows Judge Lodge, on the federal bench for a quarter century, to gradually scale back his case load, and also paves the way for the President to nominate, and the Senate to confirm, the first new federal judge in Idaho in nearly two decades.

When I read the news about Lodge’s decision I had two immediate thoughts: Like most who know him and have followed his career, I reflected on his long and distinguished tenure (something I wrote about a while back) and then, like I would bet ever lawyer and political person in Idaho, I immediately started thinking about who might replace Lodge on the federal bench.

 You can bet there will be lots of volunteers for the job Ed Lodge now holds – it pays pretty well, the work load is substantial, but the working conditions aren’t bad, and there is that “life-tenure” provision (assuming good behavior) that the Founders wrote into the Constitution. One can almost see Idaho’s lawyers gazing into their bathroom mirrors and seeing a federal judge smiling back. Like every high school senior class president who secretly thinks of herself as President of the United States one day – and I use that “her” purposefully – most lawyers, if they are candid, will admit to thinking about becoming a federal judge. It is really a pretty big deal.

So, some modestly informed guessing about how this devilishly important and mostly secret process will unfold.

If Idaho had a Democratic elected official, even one, at the federal or even the state level it might be easier to predict the nomination path for a new judge, since that elected Idaho Democrat (who, of course, doesn’t exist) would no doubt be asked for recommendations. But, lacking much opportunity for the traditional forms of political vetting for an Idaho federal appointee, the politics around a federal appointment – particularly involving a judicial nomination – will get even more interesting. I’m betting a lot of telephone calls were made over the weekend on this subject.

Obviously, Republicans dominate the state’s politics, but just as obviously the person with the Constitutional mandate to do the nominating of Ed Lodge’s replacement is a Democrat. You can bet Senators Mike Crapo and Jim Risch, both lawyers, are working on a strategy to impact the appointment process, and in a more direct way than merely participating in the “advise and consent” role reserved to the Senate on such matters. Beyond those assumptions, we really slip into uncharted territory with the prospect of a new Idaho judge, particularly given the likelihood that the U.S. Senate will fall into Republican hands after November’s election. Presumably that would only give Idaho Republicans even more leverage over the appointment.

Idaho’s Senators could elect to approach the White House about forming a bi-partisan, merit-based panel to make a recommendation (as happened when Idaho Judge Lynn Winmill was nominated in 1995), but that would require both the Idaho Republicans and the Democratic administration to agree to work together and abide by the results of such  process, which may not be agreeable to anyone.

Risch has already hinted that he will invoke a little known Senate tradition – the blue slip – that allows a home state Senator to quietly block a nominee that a Senator finds objectionable for any reason. The Senator’s comment to the Coeur d’Alene Press last week mentioning the “blue slip” process wasn’t merely political analysis, but a signal about how long the new Idaho judge process will take, how complicated the decision can become, and the degree to which good old partisan politics will play a role.

The quaint, behind-the-scenes Senate practice “is not widely discussed, but it is a common practice in the United States Senate,” Risch told The Press. “Unless both U.S. senators sign the blue slip and return it to the judiciary and rules committee, that (nominee) will not leave the judiciary and rules committee.” Risch also said, as the paper reported, “that, by custom, every senator maintains some control of a nomination – with ‘veto power’ – over who is appointed from the senator’s state to the federal bench.”

Legal analyst and New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin says of “the blue slip” process: “Blue slips are not authorized or mentioned in the Constitution, in federal law, or even in the rules of the Senate. They are nothing more than a tradition, which has been in use off and on (mostly on) since the early twentieth century.”

In a piece analyzing the use of the Senate “blue slip,” Toobin predicted – in a case exactly like Idaho’s now – that two Republican Senators might just refuse to approve any nominee of a Democratic President, particularly when that President is Barack Obama. That begs the question of whether Crapo and Risch will just stall the selection of Lodge’s replacement until after the 2016 election hoping that a Republican ends up in the White House? It could happen.

No matter how this plays out, if there in fact is a nomination before the 2016 election, Ed Lodge’s replacement will have to pass muster, behind the scenes and quietly, with Risch (assuming he’s re-elected in November) and Crapo, just as happened with a Democratic president’s nomination of Judge Winmill the last time Idaho had a vacancy on the federal bench. You may recall that then-Senators Larry Craig and Dirk Kempthorne, as well as Gov. Phil Batt, embraced Judge Winmill’s appointment by President Bill Clinton.

Assuming the process works with only a high degree of partisanship, as opposed to a high degree of political obstruction, and that is a very big assumption, who then might Obama nominate who could survive the “veto power” of two Republican U.S. Senators? I’d guess that the White House would like to nominate a woman, and that should be a major consideration since Idaho has never had a woman U.S. District Judge. Let’s begin the vetting with that assumption.

Current U.S. Magistrate Candy Dale would have to be considered a serious candidate. Judge Dale, selected for her current Hon_Candy_Dalejob by a competitive, merit review process, is smart, well regarded by the state’s legal community and young enough to occupy a federal position for a long, long time. Her recent eloquent, courageous and, in my view, correct ruling overturning Idaho’s prohibition on same sex marriage no doubt got the attention of senior officials at the U.S. Justice Department. Those who do the administration’s vetting my well like Judge Dale’s guts and reasoning on that decision, but her ruling may also cut the other way with highly partisan Republicans. Still, on the merits, and given her experience on the bench and in private practice, Judge Dale would have to be on any administration short list.

The same can be said for the current U.S. Attorney in Idaho, Wendy J. Olson. A career federal prosecutor and
wolsonofficialStanford Law School grad, Olson was a widely praised choice for the U.S. Attorney position when she was nominated in 2010. She has a strong record prosecuting white collar crime and would also merit White House and Justice Department consideration because of her serious involvement in civil rights issues. She has conducted herself in a low-key, competent and non-partisan way in her current job and, like Judge Dale, is young enough to serve on the federal bench for a long time. If the White House wants to make it difficult for Idaho’s Republican senators to play overt politics with the federal judgeship, they could appoint either of this highly qualified, and not terribly political women. Either would make it difficult for Crapo and Risch to say “no.”

One more highly qualified woman who I suspect would sail through a confirmation process is former Idaho Linda Copple Trout
Supreme Court Chief Justice Linda Copple Trout. The first woman to serve on Idaho’s highest court, appointed by former Democratic Gov. Cecil D. Andrus, Trout has a first-class intellect, a solid record as a trial and appeals court judge and a winning personality. Justice Trout is also tough and no nonsense. It’s easy to see her commanding instant respect on the federal bench. She may not want the position, but it would be hard to argue that she isn’t qualified.

If the Obama Administration wants a relatively quick – and I mean relatively quick – process to replace the distinguished Judge Lodge, and wants to make Idaho history and appoint a woman, and also seeks a highly qualified candidate who is well respected in the legal community, and comes without a lot of partisan political baggage, they now have a short list.

There will be much about this important and far-reaching process that will be fascinating to watch. Not least will be whether the Obama Administration is smart enough and agile enough to manage the nomination and confirmation of a federal judge in a deeply red state so as to make it difficult – or even impossible – for the state’s two Republican Senators to throw sand in the political gears.

Tomorrow, I’ll make the case for a couple of other worthy candidates. But, feel free to forward this to Attorney General Eric Holder. Now that he has announced his departure once his successor is confirmed, he should have a little time to think about the Obama Administration’s legacy in Idaho. This appointment will be a pretty big deal out here and it could make history.

Baseball, Justice Department, Politics, Santorum

The Problem Post

Posted on by christian

Corruption at the Justice Department

When U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, as now seems likely, is held in contempt of Congress in the next few days he will join a long list of the nation’s chief law enforcement officers who have run afoul of Congress and/or the law.

Whether the fast and furious controversy surrounding Holder is really sufficient to warrant finding him in contempt of Congress is a subject for another day. I will note that in most cases were an Attorney General has gotten seriously crosswise with Congress have been decidedly more bi-partisan affairs than Holder’s. History remembers when the AG offends both parties, not so much when the alleged offense seems more political than pernicious.

At that other extreme, consider the case of Attorney General Harry P. Daugherty. That’s him in the photo. Daugherty was an Ohio pol, campaign manager for Warren G. Harding and up until John Mitchell, Nixon’s AG who went to jail over Watergate, arguably the most corrupt head of the Justice Department in our history.

Harding, of course, is often at or near the bottom of those surveys of the country’s worst presidents. He can thank his friend Harry Daugherty for a good deal of that reputation.

Daugherty was forced to resign as Attorney General in 1923 after a bi-partisan Senate committee conducted a free-wheeling investigation into his leadership at the Justice Department.  Progressive Democratic Sen. Burton K. Wheeler of Montana led the Senate probe even though the Senate was controlled by Republicans. The nominal chair of the Senate Select Committee, a figure now lost to history, but worth remembering, was Iowa Sen. Smith Brookhart, a liberal Republican in the Teddy Roosevelt tradition. Brookhart and Wheeler knew each other, trusted each other and were pretty sure Daugherty was oily or worse. He was.

Wheeler’s investigation was sensational in the full tabloid meaning of the word, including testimony about gambling, girls and bootleg gin. The fact that the investigation of Attorney General Daugherty came in the wake of the equally sensational, and ultimately more important, Teapot Dome investigation, guaranteed that Wheeler and his motley cast of witnesses – a gumshoe, a call girl and various small-time confidence men – would get front page coverage. Daugherty resigned just ahead of an impeachment effort, but went out with his verbal guns blazing. The former Attorney General convinced himself Wheeler was a Communist agent – the foremost commie in the Senate, he said – and a seriously dangerous man. He wasn’t.

In the annuls of Senate history the Daugherty investigation helped establish an enduring principle that ironically allows California Rep. Darryl Issa to put Eric Holder through the wringer today. As part of the Senate investigation of Harding’s attorney general, Daugherty’s brother Malachi or Mal, a small-town, small-time corrupt Ohio banker, was called to testify before Wheeler’s committee. Mal Daugherty refused and was held in contempt. (He eventually went to jail for stealing from his own bank.)

Mal challenged the constitutionality of a Senate committee being able to compel his testimony, the case went all the way to the Supreme Court and the Court held in a unanimous ruling that the power of Congress to investigate and compel appearance by witness was an essential part of the legislative process. Thank a crook and a crooked Attorney General for the enduring principle of the Congressional investigation.

The job of Attorney General is arguably the most controversial in the Cabinet. Harry Daugherty was a small-time pol, likely profoundly corrupt, who should never have had the job. John Mitchell, Nixon’s finance guy, was similar with no particularly distinguished legal career and seeing the job as more about politics than policy or justice. Robert Kennedy, one of the most famous and powerful AG’s, was his brother’s political enforcer and chief confidante. (Can you imagine a president being able to get away today with having his brother at the Justice Department?)

Franklin Roosevelt’s first AG, Homer Cummings, was a political operative first and a not very skillful administrator second. Woodrow Wilson had three AG’s, including the infamous A. Mitchell Palmer, architect of the Palmer Raids that rounded up, mostly under highly dubious circumstances, various alleged radicals in 1919 and 1920 and set off the Red Scare.

The list of truly great Attorneys General is a good deal smaller than those who failed to distinguish themselves in the job. Judge Griffin Bell in the Carter years comes to mind as well as Nicholas Katzenbach in the Johnson Administration and Edward Levi, who distinguished himself in the Ford Administration.

Eric Holder may or may not be the target of an unfair and purely partisan election year attack, laced with just enough gun background noise to really appeal to the GOP base, but if he has studied the history of the Justice Department he should know that being AG almost always entitled the holder of the job to be vilified and hauled before Congress to account for all sorts of misdeeds both real and imagined. Perhaps the current Attorney General can take some comfort in knowing he’s not the first.

 

Baseball, Civility, Justice Department, Organized Labor, Political Correctness, Politics

Stupid Times Three

Posted on by christian

Ozzie, Commies and Stay at Home Moms

Bad luck like stupid comments seems to come in threes.

Ozzie Guillen, the mouth-running, currently suspended manager of the Miami Marlins baseball team is at once the most politically incorrect man in America and the luckiest. He desperately needed to get off the front pages after taking Miami’s re-branded team, cozy in its new stadium, and running his mouth straight into south Florida’s visceral hatred of Fidel Castro.

Ozzie says his comments in Spanish praising Fidel lost something in translation, but what Guillen really mangled with his ill-considered comments about the country’s least favorite commie was an old and simple rule. Loud mouth baseball managers really should never comment on anything other than what happens between the lines. Danger lurks out there beyond the friendly confines – remember Marge Schott – where men play the boys game.

But thanks to cable television, just as it looked like Ozzie might still pay for his Fidel praising with his job, two other stupid comments make Ozzie seem so last season.

Enter Republican Rep. Allen West of Florida – what is it with Florida, anyway – and Democratic political operative and CNN talking head Hilary Rosen. Consider them the duo with the crazy opinions today. Ozzie Guillen must be smiling as he sits out his suspension somewhere. Nothing spikes a stupid political comment like another stupid political comment.

In West’s case it was the astounding contention that a majority of the Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives – West said 78 to 81 members to be imprecise – are communists or socialists. And Rosen popped off on cable to the effect that Mitt Romney’s obviously smart and appealing wife had never worked a day in her life.

Two things, I think, are at play from Guillen to West to Rosen, and no that is not a double play combination. The first is the modern media age’s unrelenting pursuit of opinion as opposed to fact. Everyone is expected to have an opinion on absolutely everyone and everything and be prepared to offer it up at the drop of a question. It has become socially unacceptable to say, “Geez, I don’t know that I have anything to say about that subject.” Or even this: “You know, that’s really a silly question and I chose not to respond to silly questions.”

The other problem is a growing inability on the part of many in public life to tell one of their friends that they are just flat wrong. This has become a particular problem for politicians. Congressman West made his silly comment – opinion devoid of fact really – at some type of a friendly town hall meeting. The question that prompted his opinion came from the audience and, I’m guessing here, he wanted to play to the crowd so he answered in a way that he thought the crowd would appreciate. Maybe West believes what he said, too, but he was clearly playing to the crowd. He might have simply said in response to a silly question, “That is a silly question” and moved on. Rather he offered the alternative, an ill-considered opinion that helped move Ozzie off the front page.

Same with Rosen. She was trying to make the point that the Romney’s aren’t like most Americans who worry about mortgage payments and buying groceries, but she couldn’t stop there. Opinions being the coin of the talking head realm, she couldn’t resist offering a further opinion about Ann Romney. Not having a “real job” would, by the way, be news to any woman who has raised five sons and been a partner to a corporate CEO and a governor. The comment was, well, stupid, but Rosen was behaving the way a partisan TV talking head is expected to behave. She has to have a million of them, opinions that is.

So, as author Steve Rushin has pointed out, I am myself dangerously close to failing to practice what I preach against since – hold on – I’m having an opinion. Rushin calls such behavior a sequel to the movie Blowhard, which I confess I have never had the pleasure of seeing. The sequel, however, would be called Blowhard 2 – Blow Harder.

I long for the moment when some talking head or politician or sports figure just doesn’t go there. And it’s not about political correctness or free speech. My mother would have called it good manners. I can almost hear her, “You don’t have to comment on everything,” she would say. “Did it ever occur to you that other people may not care what you have to say.”

I’ll bet Ozzie’s mom told him something similar and he just forgot. And that’s my opinion and I’m sticking with it, while searching for that movie sequel on DVD – Blow Harder.

 

American Presidents, Andrus, Baucus, Boise, Civility, Egan, Idaho Politics, Justice Department, Obama, U.S. Senate

One of the Good Guys

Posted on by christian

Clancy Standridge, 1927-2012

More than 20 years ago I was on the way home from a trip to Washington, D.C. with Clancy Standridge, who was for many years the legislative liaison and a top political confidante of my old boss Idaho Gov. Cecil D. Andrus. It was late, the flight had been a long one, we were a little grumpy and tired from a series of those non-stop and not very productive meetings you often have in the nation’s capitol. As we stumbled up the long concourse in the Salt Lake City airport headed for the connecting flight to Idaho, handsome, debonair Clancy offered up an observation I have found myself repeating ever since. “This time of day,” he said, “your shoes feel like they are on the wrong feet.” Everyone laughed and the ordeal of getting home suddenly didn’t seem so onerous. That was Clancy Standridge.

Anyone who was around the Idaho Statehouse during the late 1980’s and early 1990’s will remember white haired, well-tailored Clancy Standridge who died recently in Portland, Oregon at age 84. It is a testament to Standridge’s skill with people and Andrus’s sense about what a Democratic governor had to do to interact successfully with an overwhelmingly Republican legislature that the state’s political watchers still say that Clancy was as good a gubernatorial emissary as has ever prowled the third and fourth floors of the Idaho Statehouse.

Clancy did his job the old fashioned way with unfailing courtesy, easy charm, a warm smile, a great sense of humor and by treating the most junior page with the same respect as the Speaker of the House. He also never forgot a commitment or failed to keep his word. Legislative attaches, the hardworking women who make the legislative machinery run, loved him. He handed out candy and compliments and people trusted him. It was remarkable the kind of gossip the old boy would pick up just by listening and being interested. When a junior backbencher just had to see the governor, Clancy made it happen. When a legislator who had consistently voted against everything the governor proposed, but still wanted a picture taken when his pet bill was finally signed into law, Clancy saw to it.

Born in Oklahoma on the cusp of the depression decade, Standridge was raised by grandparents, made his way west, served during the Korean War and hooked on with GTE, the old telephone company. He started out climbing poles and eventually worked up (or down) to serve as a senior government relations executive. Andrus plucked him from retirement to serve as his eyes and ears with the legislature. It’s hard to think he could have made a better pick. Clancy was smart, well read, schooled in politics, but more than anything he was a practitioner of the kind of personal style attributed to another Okie, Will Rogers, of whom it was said he never met a man he didn’t like. In politics, of course, you do meet people you don’t like, Clancy just never let on. I never heard him use the word, but Clancy Standridge practiced the art of civility, in fact he wrote the book on how to deal with people in the world of politics.

At a time when Barack Obama is criticized, even by those in his own party, for being distant and a loner, when it takes a Camp David-like effort to get two golf loving politicians, the president and House Speaker John Boehner, together to play a round, and when bipartisanship can’t even extend to the dinner table, it’s worth remembering what a little civility can accomplish. Despite the toxic nature of our politics and even in the face of poll tested attack lines the world – including the political world – still works on the basis of personal relationships.

Washington waxes nostalgic for the time when Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill could make a deal on taxes or when Lyndon Johnson and Everett Dirksen could have a couple of belts followed by a handshake and move the country forward on civil rights. A few more D.C. golf games, a few more cocktails on the Truman balconey and a little more common decency in Washington and in every state capitol wouldn’t hurt any politician and it would be good for the country.

The little courtesies, the random acts of kindness work to build trust and respect and even powerful people can be moved. It becomes a little more difficult to call the political opponent an SOB when you’ve had dinner with the SOB and his wife and found out about his kids, his motivations and his needs. Personal relationships grease the wheels of politics or, if common decency and respect don’t exist, the gears seize up more frequently. Does anyone think the country would be worse off if Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell shared a laugh together once in a while? Harry ought to send Mitch’s wife flowers on her birthday. Clancy Standridge would have tried something that simple and that effective.

Clancy Standridge knew all about personal relationships. He was one of a kind, but I hope not the last of his kind.

 

Arizona, Baseball, Church, Civility, Giffords, John V. Evans, Justice Department, Politics

Tucson

Posted on by christian

One Year On

A year ago this weekend Tucson, Arizona was at the center of the world. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, a vibrant up-and-coming moderate Democrat, was shot during a saturday morning meet and greet with her constituents at a Safeway store a mile or so from where we retreat whenever we can from southern Idaho’s winter inversions. Six other people who were nearby the Congresswoman that day, including a nine year old girl and a respected federal judge, died. Many others were injured.

Those events just a year ago seem as though they happened last week, and at the same time, they seem – our attention span being what it is – like ancient history.

In Tucson, a genuinely civilized place an hour north of the Mexican border, seemingly everything might have changed and regretably perhaps very little has changed over the last year. Gifford’s remarkable recovery from her brain injury that awful January day seems to me a miracle. She’ll appear with her husband Mark Kelly at a candle light vigil memorial service on Sunday. She is still a Member of Congress, undecided on whether to seek another term in a swing district that both parties would love to have come November. A moving ceremony was held in the Catalina foothills this week to dedicate a monument to one of Giffords’ young staff members, Gabe Zimmerman, who did not survive the attack. A series of other activities are scheduled to mark the events of January 8, 2011.

The Tucson community seems, in many respects, committed to remembering, and finding a way forward from, what is widely called The Event. The University of Arizona, for example, has established The National Institute for Civil Discourse and former Presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush are the national co-chairs.

Still, as the Tucson Weekly notes, so much about the shooting remains either a mystery or unresolved a year later. The shooter, a deeply troubled young man, continues to be evaluated as he waits to stand trial. The passionate discussion in the aftermath of the shooting about the desperate need for better mental health services in Arizona and the nation seems to have passed quietly away. The determined calls for calmer and more civil political discourse, calls that seemed so sensible in the wake of January 8, have been overtaken by another political election cycle that is destined to dump millions of dollars– maybe more – into the dissimination of some of the nastiest, most anonymous political attacks in the history of the republic. Sensible ideas about keeping weapons from the potentially deadly hands of the mentally ill are unthinkable as subjects for debate in the presidential election campaign. The Congressional newspaper, The Hill, reports that security concerns in Congress have largely given way to a return to business as usual.

Life in America goes on and so does the peculiar kind of American death that visited Tucson a year ago.

Last month, according to FBI data, 1.5 million Americans acquired a hand gun. A female U.S. Park Service Ranger, the mother of two young daughers, was shot and killed days ago at a roadblock in Rainier National Park in Washington. The shooter was an Iraq war veteran. Last fall, a mentally troubled faculty member at the University of Idaho shot and killed one of his students. Six police officers were shot, one killed and two are still critical, during a drug raid in Utah in the last week.

Americans have embraced wars on drugs, illegal immigration, radical Muslim terrorists, even wars on cancer and heart diesease, but no war on gun violence. Washington Congressman Norm Dicks, a proponent of a sensible and extremely limited policy to ban guns from the national parks, says such a move, limited as it would be, is impossible given that the “NRA (the National Rifle Association) has a majority in the House and the Senate – that’s the reality of it.”

No tragedy, not Gabby Giffords’ wounding and six deaths in Tucson a year ago, not the senseless murder of a Park Service Ranger, not massacres at Virginia Tech University or Fort Hood, can cause the nation’s leaders to even pause and consider a better course for guns. The public policy response to American handgun violence is simply non-existent and the candle light vigils will continue, year after year.

The Arizona events are remembered this weekend with deep sorrow and with the peculiarly American response to such senseless violence – hope for a better future. Hope, regrettably, is not a strategy. A candle light vigil, as important and heartfelt as it will be, is not enough.

The Tucson dead, nine-year-old Christina Taylor-Greene, Judge John Roll, Dorothy “Dot” Morris, Phyllis Schneck, Dorwin Stoddard and Gabe Zimmerman, along with all the other victims of our unique epidemic of gun violence, deserve to be remembered every day, but they deserve better from their leaders, as well.

 

Civility, Giffords, John V. Evans, Justice Department

Dumping Dupnik

Posted on by christian

tea party cartoonTea Party Seeks Tucson Sheriff Recall

It was probably inevitable given our overheated politics. The Pima County, Arizona sheriff, Clarence Dupnik, has become the target – I use that term advisedly – of a recall effort.

The Arizona Daily Star’s talented political cartoonist, David Fitzsimmons, sums up this news item up nicely when he has a cartoon recall supporter say, “It’s really nice to see the community pulling together at a time like this.”

A Tucson Tea Party group claims the sheriff’s post-Gabrielle Giffords shooting comments “were irresponsible and had no basis in any fact. It’s not what law enforcement officers should do when inserting themselves into politics.” No mention of the fact that the sheriff has been re-elected repeatedly since 1980 as a Democrat. By any fair definition, this guy is into politics, but we digress.

Other supporters of the Dump Dupnik effort have charged with sheriff with being a “leftist,” that he intended to protect the “shooter” or that he “hasn’t enforced the law.” Just the kind of broad, sweeping, factless nonsense that so often passes for political debate in America these days.

There is even an Idaho angle to the story. According to the Star, former Idaho Congressman Bill Sali is advising the recall proponents, who are – you might wonder why – being lead by a Salt Lake City talk radio host.

For his part the sheriff is hardly backing down from his basic contention that the vitriol of current political discourse has consequences.

“I’m sure that this demented person (suspect Jared Lee Loughner) didn’t do what he did because of Rush Limbaugh, specifically, or Sarah Palin or … Glenn Beck. But it’s a conglomeration. When people hear this vitriol every day, it has some consequences and I think that’s how the tea party got so darned angry so fast.”

What he does know, the sheriff told the Star, “is that Loughner was angry at government and ‘I think in his demented mind, he saw her (Giffords) as representing government.'”

The interview with the sheriff, printed on February 6, has of this morning drawn 275 on line comments from Arizona Daily Star readers. You can imagine the tone of most of them and a number were apparently so “uncivil” as to be removed by the newspaper.

Two things stand out here.

First, recalls aren’t about removing people from office simply because you disagree with them or with something they’ve said. Recalls should be reserved for malfeasance and, as the Constitution says about misbehaving public officials, “high crimes and misdemeanors.” You find disagreement with a politician, run or vote against them. Sheriff Dupnik has to face the votes again in 2012. He got just over 64% last time and he says he’ll probably run again. Have at it. Beat him at the polls, if you can.

Second, the intensity surrounding the Arizona sheriff just proves the point that we struggle right now to find a way to disagree with each other while not being totally disagreeable. We simply must get better at this and everyone has a role and a stake.

The Christian Science Monitor, in noting Tucson Mayor Bob Walkup’s civility initiative with other U.S. Mayors, printed a short piece called “four ways to kick the polarized partisan habit.” It’s worth a read and a visit to the Public Conversations Project website is worthwhile, as well.

I found one of the four rules particularly appropriate: “Fight for Technicolor – Don’t reduce everyone and everything to black and white. Stand up for the multicolored reality of yourself and others.”

Speaking of Technicolor, the Slate website produced a profile of the controversial sheriff early in January. It’s worth reading. Here’s a key sentence: “a look through Dupnik’s past reveals a much more complex figure than his current portrayal as a liberal Democratic crusader.” Really.

One thing our media often does, and too many public officials perpetuate, is to reduce every issue and every personality to a “black and white, yes and no” equation. In the real world, things can’t be done so simply or so surely.

The real world – and real people – operate in Technicolor. Black and white, except for the occasional Humphrey Bogart movie, really should be obsolete.