Editor: The first paragraphs of Turley’s commentary on Ketanji Brown Jackson’s technocracy!
As is increasingly becoming the case, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson stole the show with some of her comments on her view of the underlying constitutional issues. She suggested that “experts” in the Executive Branch generally should not be subject to termination by a president. It is a virtual invitation for a technocracy rather than a democracy.
Jackson continued her signature role in oral arguments by effectively arguing the case of one side. At points, Jackson interrupted counsel to instruct him on his “best arguments” and spoke at length to counter the questions of her conservative colleagues.
What was most striking was Jackson’s dismissal of the executive power claims in such agencies. As with Justice Elena Kagan, Jackson raised “real-world” concerns rather than articulate a clear constitutional theory supporting the creation of these hybrid bodies — part legislative and part executive — resting in the executive branch.
In confronting U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer (who did another masterful job) in a difficult oral argument, Jackson said she did “not understand” why “agencies aren’t answering to Congress.” Jackson simply brushed aside the fact that the president is given authority to execute the laws and that the executive branch is established under the Constitution.
The argument was maddeningly circular: since Congress created the commission, it must necessarily be Congress’s right to dictate how commissioners can serve or be fired. It was conclusory and shallow in its analysis.
Jackson expressed frustration: ‘I really don’t understand why the agencies aren’t answering to Congress. Congress established them and can eliminate them. Congress funds them, and can stop. So, to the extent that we’re concerned that there’s some sort of entity that is out of control and has no control, I guess I don’t understand that argument.”
She then added her support for a virtual technocracy:
I guess I have a very different view of the dangers, and real-world consequences of your position than what you explored with Justice Kavanaugh. My understanding was that independent agencies exist because Congress has decided that some issues, some matters, some areas should be handled in this way by non-partisan experts, that Congress is saying that expertise matters — with respect to aspects of the economy, and transportation, and the various independent agencies that we have. So, having a president come in and fire all the scientists, and the doctors, and the economists, and the PhDs, and replacing them with loyalists and people who don’t know anything, is actually not in the best interest of the citizens of the United States. These issues should not be in presidential control. So, can you speak to me about the danger of allowing, in these various areas, the president to actually control the Transportation Board and potentially the Federal Reserve, and all these other independent agencies. In these particular areas, we would like to have independence, we don’t want the president controlling. I guess what I don’t understand from your overarching argument is why that determination of Congress — which makes perfect sense given its duty to protect the people of the United States, why that is subjugated to a concern about the president not being able to control everything.
…
In Turley’s opinion technocracy trumps the opinions of the Court itself! Turley sees the approach of another way of viewing or approaching the law, that perhaps puts Lawyering, and the primacy of The Court, in another kind of light? Or should I call it an unwanted refraction of a kind?
Editor: To say that Friedman’s political opportunism is wedded to an exercise in public shaming of Trump, and his appoitees deserves condemnation is an exercise in what? Is self-aggrandisement too strong a concept? From a man, a writer who defamed Corbyn, with a kind of gusto that Trumps minions excell at in another context? JD Vance is perhaps the example that comes to mind! Or should a writer concetrate on the misdeeds of the Historical Moment, rather than look at another revelatory Historical Moment, of the past as a kind of revelatory frame for the political present?
The Trump administration looks ever more like a criminal enterprise – and now it seems to have added war crimes to its repertoire. Though even that may be too generous a description.
On Thursday, word came that the US military had launched yet another deadly strike on a small boat moving through international waters. This time the attack killed four people, bringing to at least 87 the number of people the US has killed in a series of 22 such strikes on what it says are drug boats – vessels carrying illicit narcotics in the Caribbean or eastern Pacific.
This has been happening for months, but the issue has only just drawn political heat thanks to a Washington Post investigation of the first such attack on 2 September. The paper reported that US forces hit the targeted boat once, then hit it again – the second strike killing two survivors clinging to the wreckage. According to the Post, the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, had issued a verbal command to “kill them all”.
…
Editor: With a mere 1173 words left in Freedland’s exercise in ‘High dudgeon’ left to explore, what might the reader contemplate as a possible future for the American Republic? Might that reader contemplate a senario viaFletcher Knebel & Charles W. Bailey II Seven Days in May?
Political Observer : The Reader must demand a the transcript! Even John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge used the The Economist as ‘the rehersal space’ for all those BestSellers!
Editor: Reader take note that The Economist once had a vibrant comments section, that was discarded ! I once received two phone calls from the same represetative of The Economist as to the ‘why’ of my cancelation of my long time subscription. I was blunt! That comments section always was worthy of my time and attention, such was the quality of the comments section and its regular commentors!
Micklethwait & Wooldridge Best-Sellers:
The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea: 2005
The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State: 2014
God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World: 2009
The Witch Doctors: Making Sense of the Management Gurus: 1996
A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization: 2000
The Wake-Up Call: Why the pandemic has exposed the weakness of the West – and how to fix it: 2020
The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America : 2004
Editor: By reading Micklethwait & Wooldridge in The Economist the reader was, in essence, reading the the ‘dress rehersals’ of those Best-Sellers !
Is this essay Sol Stern seeks the root of the current revival of ‘antisemitism’ to it’s origin: the great Jewish thinker and Heidegger apologist Hannah Arendt. Here we have the latest installment of the current war on the policies and practices of the Zionist state’s critics, in the guise of an intellectual history of a prominent ‘self-hating Jew’ (a term that has lost it appeal because it no longer retains its ability to shock and confound) published by The Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. Here is an informative paragraph that appears early in the essay,I quote it in full:
“Since the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem, serious scholars have debunked the most inflammatory of Arendt’s charges. Nevertheless, for today’s defamers of Israel, Arendt is a patron saint, a courageous Jewish intellectual who saw Israel’s moral catastrophe coming. These leftist intellectuals don’t merely believe, as Arendt did, that she was the victim of “excommunication” for the sin of criticizing Israel. Their homage to Arendt runs deeper. In fact, their campaign to delegitimize the state of Israel and exile it from the family of nations—another kind of excommunication, if you will—derives several of its themes from Arendt’s writings on Zionism and the Holocaust. Those writings, though deeply marred by political naivety and personal rancor, have now metastasized into a destructive legacy that undermines Israel’s ability to survive as a lonely democracy, surrounded by hostile Islamic societies.”
Mr. Stern has mapped the territory of his polemic, so the rest is simply elaboration on his chosen theme. What we do know from Young-Bruehl’s biography of Arendt is that she had an agreement with her professors, that she would leave her classes if the antisemitic remarks by her fellow students became too much. So her consciousness of her Jewishness was a phenomenon that probably came earlier that Mr. Stern indicates in his essay. Although that piece of key evidence might just subvert the political intention of his piece, even if it’s impact be minimal to his argument. That Arendt and many young intellectuals including, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, Herbert Marcus were spellbound by the lectures of Heidegger, he taught a generation of German students. Consult :The Young Heidegger,Rumor of the Hidden King by John van Buren and Heidegger’s Children by Richard Wolin.
In this long essay Mr. Stern merely sketches the political missteps, bad faith and political naivete of Arendt on the Zionist question that serves his narrative thrust, that she was an apostate to the followers of the evolving party line of mainstream Zionism: she was radically independent, she went her own way, a dissenter. That is the problem with Arendt, she thought independently and expressed herself forcefully;her intellectual heirs share her problem. The party line is not served by dissenters, by apostates. (Let me conjecture here that Arendt was in all likelihood one of the few women involved in any capacity with the formation of the state of Israel, at least in its intellectual dimension: she was a lone female voice in a field dominated by men habituated to their patriarchal privilege.) That is the central argument is this piece of backhanded propaganda, masquerading as intellectual history,updated to serve the needs of present day apologists for the self-destructive nihilism of Israeli politics.
But let me quote the prescient Arendt on the future of Israel, that seems to elude Mr. Stern’s intellectual and argumentative grasp.
“degenerate into one of those small warrior tribes about whose possibilities and importance history has amply informed us since the days of Sparta. Their relations with world Jewry would become problematical, since their defense interests might clash at any moment with those of other countries where large numbers of Jews lived. Palestine Jewry would eventually separate itself from the larger body of world Jewry and in its isolation develop into an entirely new people. Thus it becomes plain that at this moment and under present circumstances a Jewish state can only be erected at the price of the Jewish homeland.”
This could be a description of the fortress state of contemporary Israel, although Mr. Stern misses it’s currency. Another quote from near the end of this seemingly interminable indictment:
“Making the charges all the more outrageous is that we now know that she herself, at the time of the trial, was voluntarily engaged in a collaboration of sorts with Heidegger, who never repented for his Nazi allegiance. According to the historian Richard Wolin, Arendt served “as Heidegger’s de facto American literary agent, diligently overseeing contracts and translations of his books.”
Arendt always spoke to the fact that her work owed its genesis to the philosophical project of Heidegger, and that she maintained a deep intellectual connection and affection for him. Was he worth her loyalty and affection? Perhaps we should ask the same question of Marcuse, Jaspers, Gadamer, Löwith, and a host of his other students. I have chosen to comment on certain sections of Mr. Stern’s long polemic against Arendt, as apostate, but let me quote from the end of most telling paragraph:
“Those writings, though deeply marred by political naivety and personal rancor, have now metastasized into a destructive legacy that undermines Israel’s ability to survive as a lonely democracy, surrounded by hostile Islamic societies.”
Israel has the best equipped and trained military out side of the USA, that is America’s 147 billion dollars military investment, our unmanageable protectorate. It has between 100 and 400 atomic weapons and the capability and the means to deliver them. Israel is neither beleaguered nor threatened, except in the collective mind of certain political factions, whose reason to be is to stir up war fever against Iran: the only ‘Middle East Democracy’ flourishes on an unending flow of American dollars.
It must be so nice to play Hannah Arendt. No fewer than five actresses are on stage this evening at the Deutsches Theater Berlin to portray the philosopher. The piece is an adaptation of the graphic novel by American illustrator Ken Krimstein about the philosopher’s life, called “The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt,” combined with scenes from the famous interview that journalist Günter Gaus conducted with Arendt in 1964 for German public broadcaster ZDF.
Five actresses, then. They play Arendt and a few of her contemporaries, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, the writer Walter Benjamin, her husband Heinrich Blücher. There is a great deal of speech in the play, especially from Arendt herself. The places of her life are ticked off, her childhood in Königsberg, her student years in Marburg and the affair with Heidegger. Life in Berlin in the early 1930s and her flight from Germany when the Nazis came to power. Exile in Paris and arrival in New York, where she then became known as a political theorist in the early 1950s.
It is clever, sometimes also funny, and when the five actresses stand on stage at the end and receive the audience’s applause while standing next to a small table piled with Arendt’s books, the whole thing is a bit reminiscent of “I’m Not There,” that film in which five actors (and one Cate Blanchett) play Bob Dylan.
Bob Dylan though? Is that the category we’re speaking about when we talk about Hannah Arendt?
She passed away 50 years ago. She suffered a heart attack on December 4, 1975. As a result, she was unable to complete her last book, which was supposed to be called “The Life of the Mind.” She was well-known at the time, but far from famous.
Half a century later, she is everywhere. The Thalia Theater in Hamburg just premiered a play in which Corinna Harfouch plays the philosopher; and an Arendt play is also running in Stuttgart. Two new biographies have just been published, even though one came out just two years ago. There are now at least a dozen of them. A film about Arendt also hit the silver screen in late summer. Every politician who has ever held a book in their hand has dropped a few sentences about Arendt in an interview. Angela Merkel, Robert Habeck, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. The governor of Baden-Württemberg, Winfried Kretschmann, has even written a book about her, published a few weeks ago.
Everyone wants a piece of her. The liberals, because freedom was the concept around which her thinking revolved. The leftists, because she always stood up to power. The conservatives, because she could find nothing appealing in socialism. The feminists, because she was a self-confident woman who refused to be intimidated in the male-dominated world of great thinkers. The conspiracy theorists, because Arendt believed that politics must not allow science to take away the primacy of decision-making. The critics of Israel, who believe they can align themselves with her criticism of the state of Israel. The friends of Israel, who recall her Zionist activism.
And the influencers, because she was cool and not only wrote thick books but also left behind sentences that look good on any Instagram post. Some really are direct quotes – while others are only almost verbatim. “No one has the right to obey.” “The meaning of politics is freedom.” “Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers.” “The problem was not what our enemies did, but what our friends did.” “Thinking is dangerous.” The list goes on and on. And we still haven’t mentioned the “banality of evil,” the kind of signature sentence reserved only for the likes of Theodor Adorno (”There is no right life in the wrong one”) or René Descartes (”I think, therefore I am”).
Is that, though, all people want from Arendt? A good saying, a bit of confirmation and a pat on the back? Is Hannah Arendt helpful in dark times because she makes one feel good?
Present-day upheavals would undoubtedly have felt familiar to Arendt. Authoritarian rulers, anti-Semitism, post-factual politics, mass migration, conspiracy theories, democracy on a shaky foundation. She experienced all of this herself. Fascism, communism, liberalism. World War I, Weimar, World War II, Cold War. She defended herself against the challenges of her era in ever new ways – by trying to understand them. One must “be completely present,” Arendt believed. That is an extremely compelling attitude in a confusing world like today’s.
Is this essay Sol Stern seeks the root of the current revival of ‘antisemitism’ to it’s origin: the great Jewish thinker and Heidegger apologist Hannah Arendt. Here we have the latest installment of the current war on the policies and practices of the Zionist state’s critics, in the guise of an intellectual history of a prominent ‘self-hating Jew’ (a term that has lost it appeal because it no longer retains its ability to shock and confound) published by The Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. Here is an informative paragraph that appears early in the essay,I quote it in full:
“Since the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem, serious scholars have debunked the most inflammatory of Arendt’s charges. Nevertheless, for today’s defamers of Israel, Arendt is a patron saint, a courageous Jewish intellectual who saw Israel’s moral catastrophe coming. These leftist intellectuals don’t merely believe, as Arendt did, that she was the victim of “excommunication” for the sin of criticizing Israel. Their homage to Arendt runs deeper. In fact, their campaign to delegitimize the state of Israel and exile it from the family of nations—another kind of excommunication, if you will—derives several of its themes from Arendt’s writings on Zionism and the Holocaust. Those writings, though deeply marred by political naivety and personal rancor, have now metastasized into a destructive legacy that undermines Israel’s ability to survive as a lonely democracy, surrounded by hostile Islamic societies.”
Mr. Stern has mapped the territory of his polemic, so the rest is simply elaboration on his chosen theme. What we do know from Young-Bruehl’s biography of Arendt is that she had an agreement with her professors, that she would leave her classes if the antisemitic remarks by her fellow students became too much. So her consciousness of her Jewishness was a phenomenon that probably came earlier that Mr. Stern indicates in his essay. Although that piece of key evidence might just subvert the political intention of his piece, even if it’s impact be minimal to his argument. That Arendt and many young intellectuals including, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, Herbert Marcus were spellbound by the lectures of Heidegger, he taught a generation of German students. Consult :The Young Heidegger,Rumor of the Hidden King by John van Buren and Heidegger’s Children by Richard Wolin.
In this long essay Mr. Stern merely sketches the political missteps, bad faith and political naivete of Arendt on the Zionist question that serves his narrative thrust, that she was an apostate to the followers of the evolving party line of mainstream Zionism: she was radically independent, she went her own way, a dissenter. That is the problem with Arendt, she thought independently and expressed herself forcefully;her intellectual heirs share her problem. The party line is not served by dissenters, by apostates. (Let me conjecture here that Arendt was in all likelihood one of the few women involved in any capacity with the formation of the state of Israel, at least in its intellectual dimension: she was a lone female voice in a field dominated by men habituated to their patriarchal privilege.) That is the central argument is this piece of backhanded propaganda, masquerading as intellectual history,updated to serve the needs of present day apologists for the self-destructive nihilism of Israeli politics.
But let me quote the prescient Arendt on the future of Israel, that seems to elude Mr. Stern’s intellectual and argumentative grasp.
“degenerate into one of those small warrior tribes about whose possibilities and importance history has amply informed us since the days of Sparta. Their relations with world Jewry would become problematical, since their defense interests might clash at any moment with those of other countries where large numbers of Jews lived. Palestine Jewry would eventually separate itself from the larger body of world Jewry and in its isolation develop into an entirely new people. Thus it becomes plain that at this moment and under present circumstances a Jewish state can only be erected at the price of the Jewish homeland.”
This could be a description of the fortress state of contemporary Israel, although Mr. Stern misses it’s currency. Another quote from near the end of this seemingly interminable indictment:
“Making the charges all the more outrageous is that we now know that she herself, at the time of the trial, was voluntarily engaged in a collaboration of sorts with Heidegger, who never repented for his Nazi allegiance. According to the historian Richard Wolin, Arendt served “as Heidegger’s de facto American literary agent, diligently overseeing contracts and translations of his books.”
Arendt always spoke to the fact that her work owed its genesis to the philosophical project of Heidegger, and that she maintained a deep intellectual connection and affection for him. Was he worth her loyalty and affection? Perhaps we should ask the same question of Marcuse, Jaspers, Gadamer, Löwith, and a host of his other students. I have chosen to comment on certain sections of Mr. Stern’s long polemic against Arendt, as apostate, but let me quote from the end of most telling paragraph:
“Those writings, though deeply marred by political naivety and personal rancor, have now metastasized into a destructive legacy that undermines Israel’s ability to survive as a lonely democracy, surrounded by hostile Islamic societies.”
Israel has the best equipped and trained military out side of the USA, that is America’s 147 billion dollars military investment, our unmanageable protectorate. It has between 100 and 400 atomic weapons and the capability and the means to deliver them. Israel is neither beleaguered nor threatened, except in the collective mind of certain political factions, whose reason to be is to stir up war fever against Iran: the only ‘Middle East Democracy’ flourishes on an unending flow of American dollars.
Editor: Let me begin my quotation of Friedman here:
I am sure President Trump and his envoys to Russia, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, sincerely want to stop the killing in Ukraine, but they are failing and will continue to fail as long as they persist in their naïve view that this is just a big real estate deal and that their backgrounds in real estate give them an advantage. It is utter nonsense on multiple levels.
For starters, yes, you could say that Vladimir Putin is in the real estate business in Ukraine, but not in the way Trump or Witkoff or Kushner have been in the business. Putin is in the real estate business in Ukraine the same way Hitler was in the real estate business in Poland. Hitler coveted territory not to build a hotel or housing for profit to benefit the local residents. He, instead, coveted real estate to fulfill a nationalist fantasy. Ditto Putin. He has shown no interest in the welfare of Ukraine’s people.
In that kind of situation, having a bunch of “real estate deal guys” as America’s negotiators is a liability, not an advantage. You want a Henry Kissinger or James Baker-type statesman who understands the difference between real estate and war and peace. Real estate is a positive-sum game — both sides can profit from a well-struck transaction. And that is the goal. In war and peace, when one side holds fascist views and is the clear aggressor and the other side holds democratic views and is the clear victim, you are in a zero-sum game.
Or as Ronald Reagan famously put it when asked how the Cold War should end: “We win, they lose.”
Reagan understood that real estate deals are purely over value (price per square foot) and interest rates. He understood that war-and-peace deals are about advancing and preserving moral values and strategic interests. And you don’t compromise on those with a fascist aggressor. We waged three wars, including the Cold War, alongside our allies in Europe to preserve the spread of our shared democratic values and our shared interests — namely that no major power in Europe that did not share those values could be allowed to dominate the continent.
I can think of no other American president who would have acted as if America’s values and interests dictated that we now be a neutral arbiter between Russia and Ukraine and, on top of that, an arbiter who tries to make a profit from each side in the process — as Trump has done. This is one of the most shameful episodes in American foreign policy, and the entire Republican Party is complicit in its perpetuation.
Editor: reader recall ?
Aug. 3, 1980: Reagan Gives “State’s Rights” Speech at Neshoba County Fair
On August 3, 1980, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan addressed a large crowd at the Neshoba County Fair as he campaigned in his bid for the presidency.
The fairgrounds are mere miles away from the site where three civil rights workers — one a student participating in Mississippi Freedom Summer and the other two CORE members — were murdered and buried in shallow graves by members of the Ku Klux Klan in 1964.
Reagan appealed to the “George Wallace-inclined voters” dreaming of a return to segregation and freedom of unfettered white supremacy in his stump speech:
I believe in states’ rights; I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.
In his appeal to white supremacists, he did not acknowledge the murders, which had been investigated by the FBI and were just one instance of violent assaults on local Black civil rights advocates and white allies in recent history.
Read the full speech at the Neshoba Democrat and learn more about the place of the speech in U.S. political history at The Intercept.
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