Thoughts on Presidential Immunity

I have never been comfortable with the Justice Department’s determination that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted. Although Americans are fond of saying that no one is above the law, this policy has indeed placed the president above the law. The Constitution does not require such a policy. The founders, wary of a king or king-like executive, would likely have considered the policy dangerous and ill-advised. Sadly, our fascist-friendly Supreme Court has adopted this unconstitutional policy and extended it. A president engaging in a murderous rampage against his alleged rivals is now free to carry out his program with impunity.

The argument that a president should not be subjected to the normal operation of the American judicial system is apparently predicated on the notion that the president’s having to deal with charges brought by the Department of Justice would distract the chief executive from discharging the duties of office.

This argument loses some of its cogency when one recognizes that the Constitution already provides for the Congress to impeach and try the president on vague charges of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Surely, impeachment is a significant presidential distraction. The Constitution’s impeachment provisions have two deficiencies, however. 

First, the only punishments available for the commitment of high crimes and misdemeanors are removal from office and prohibition of holding any future office. Embarrassing as this may be, it is insufficiently punitive for, say, encouraging the overthrow of the American government. For such particularly “high” crimes, the ordinary criminal justice system offers more appropriate penalties.

Second, the bar to impeachment and conviction by the Congress is absurdly high. The founders apparently did not foresee that the houses of Congress might be controlled by partisans of the president and be largely impervious to calls to cashier the nation’s leader, whatever the provocation.

 In response to the argument that indictment and prosecution would cripple the office of the president, I offer another consideration. If, in fact, the president has committed intolerable acts, distracting the president through legal entanglements may distract the miscreant from continuing his (or, improbably, her) crime spree.

A New Poem

The news that Donald Trump was elected over Kamala Harris on Tuesday last was supremely depressing. I have since been avoiding the news and listening to Prokofiev. (I discovered, for example, that I am not particularly familiar with his fifth piano concerto.) Also, I began writing a poem to express my despair. At first, I called it “My Lost Faith in America, November 2024.” Eventually, I dropped “My” from the title, but it may still be a bit unwieldy. I actually completed the poem November 6, the day after the election, but I have been gradually editing it—improving it, I hope—and adding to it. Today, I declared the poem complete. Rather by accident, it now comprises 13 stanzas—it had fewer in the beginning—which seems  appropriate for a poem about the United States.

You can read the poem and additional information about it on Lionel Deimel’s Farrago here.

Harris’s Big Mistake?

I am not ready to offer a coherent response to yesterday’s election. I offer only one thought that has bothered me throughout the Harris campaign.

Harris never offered a justification for why inflation was not the fault of the Biden administration. Although the administration’s efforts to pump up the economy had some inflationary effect—it likely avoided economic disaster—the biggest problem was supply chain disruptions caused by COVID, arguably inherited from the Trump administration. Also, she never explained what inflation really is and that it was reduced to a reasonable level under Biden. Ignorant people believe inflation is high prices, rather than increasingly higher prices. Prices will not come down unless we have a recession, which now is increasingly likely.

Are Early Voters Having Regrets?

In a recent essay on my Web site, I expressed discomfort with early voting because significant events can occur between when a person votes and the official election day.

In recent days, Donald Trump has looked old and tired and he (and his supporters) have been saying increasingly crazy and disturbing things. I wonder how many Trump early voters regret their vote in light of their candidate’s recent behavior.

My Great Big Baking Mistake

Last night, as I often do, I decided to bake some cookies to share at Clifton Springs Library’s Friday coffee hour. Rather than using one of my favorite recipes, I decided to bake Big and Chewy Oatmeal-Raisin Cookies from an America’s Test Kitchen cookbook. I had made this recipe once before and considered it a reliable choice.

My first pan of cookies was a mess. When I took it out of the oven, it contained an undifferentiated mass of congealed goop; it was impossible to separate individual cookies. I broke up the mass as best I could and dumped the resulting pieces into a plastic bag. The stuff was edible, but barely. It was time to try again.

This time, I spaced the balls of dough farther apart. The result was not unlike that of the first batch, but the cookies were at least discrete. They did, however, resemble pralines more than cookies—more stuff for the plastic bag! (See photo below.)

As I was preparing a third pan, I realized that the dough lacked its usual stiffness. And I suddenly realized that I had used no flour! I glanced at the recipe, however, and noted that the first entry in the ingredient list was

1½ cups (7½ ounces) unbleached all-purpose flour

Oops! How could I have failed to put flour into the dough? I slowly and carefully reread the instructions. Step 3 read as follows:

Decrease the speed [of the stand mixer] to low and slowly add the dry ingredients until combined, about 30 seconds. Mix in the oats and raisins (if using) until just incorporated.

I had interpreted “the dry ingredients” to mean the salt, baking powder, and nutmeg. It hadn’t occurred to me that flour was construed as a dry ingredient. It hadn’t helped that ingredients were not listed in the order used. The order of the ingredient list was, in retrospect, rather arbitrary. (Other recipes in the same cookbook used lists following the same convention.)

There was still dough in the mixing bowl, so I incorporated what seemed like a proper fraction of the 7½ ounces of flour to go with the leftover dough. The modified dough then behaved as expected. In the end, I managed to produce 10 reasonably-looking and -tasting cookies. (See the picture of the penultimate batch below.)

The obvious lesson from this unfortunate experience is to read the instructions carefully in the context of the ingredient list. Arguably, I had actually done that. Had I read the instructions and also checked off the ingredients as I did so, I would have failed to check off flour, and I might have realized that it was a “dry ingredient.” Perhaps a better strategy would have been to employ mise en place, that is gathered and measured all the ingredients before assembly. In that case, once the dough was “finished,” my bowl of flour would have been conspicuously left over.

Well, I have become a wiser baker!

Wisdom from Octavia E. Butler

I noted in my last post that I was reading Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler. Having finished that rather dark volume, I have gone on the read the sequel, Parable of the Talents. This is the story of a small community trying to survive in a country that has gone mad. The story is set in the very near future.

The protagonist of both books is Lauren Olamina, a young visionary who has created a non-theological religion she calls Earthseed. The U.S. has just elected a president who is a Christian Nationalist. (Butler doesn’t use that term, but the designation seems appropriate.) Members of the community, called “Acorn,” are anxious.

Each chapter of Parable of the Talents begins with an excerpt “From EARTHSEED: THE BOOK OF THE LIVING.” The situation cannot help remind one of our own situation on the precipice of an election. Chapter Eleven begins with this excerpt:

Choose your leaders
    with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward
    is to be controlled
    by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool
    is to be led
    by the opportunists
    who control the fool.
To be led by a thief
    is to offer up
    your most precious treasures
    to be stolen.
To be led by a liar
    is to ask
    to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant
    is to sell yourself
    and those you love
    into slavery.

Here endeth the lesson.

Gaza, Israel, Biden, and Harris

This afternoon, I listened to an interview with Palestinian poet and essayist Mosab Abu Toha on Fresh Air. Apparently, his literary credentials were in part responsible for his getting out of Gaza with his immediate family. He nevertheless was apprehended by Israel’s IDF and tortured, and, although he escaped with his wife and children, he lost friends and extended family in Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza. He is now living in Syracuse, New York.

I have been reading Octavia E. Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower. That novel is set in an American future characterized by ecological disaster, societal disintegration, and police and fire protection that offer more aggression than protection. Parable would have been distressing in 1993. It is more upsetting today, when the diary entries of protagonist Lauren Olamina carry dates of 2024 and beyond.

Listening to Abu Toha describe life in Gaza under Israeli attack reminded me of the trials of Lauren Olamina as she journeys north with her pick-up group of fellow travelers in search of a place of safety. But the horrors of that journey were at least mitigated by some minimum sense of agency for Olamina and her company. They were armed and smart. Ordinary Palestinians have no such agency. They are at the mercy of Israeli troops, Israeli air power, and the hellish environment created by Netanyahu’s war machine. They move from place to place in response to warnings from Israel, but Palestinians are neither safe indoors nor out of doors.

Terry Gross raised the question of whether what was happening in Gaza is genocide. Abu Toha did not call Israeli actions genocide but suggested that it would be so recognized decades from now. Does Netanyahu mean to kill all Palestinians in Gaza? We don’t know that he does. It is clear, however, that many Israelis would raise a collective sigh of relief if there were no more Palestinians in Gaza, a piece of real estate rapidly becoming uninhabitable.

The Israeli attack on Gaza after the Hamas October 7 incursion a year ago is both understandable and justifiable. Yet, this war looks different from other modern conflicts. American journalists have been kept out of Gaza, and many Palestinian journalists have been killed. Not even Israelis—maybe especially Israelis—have a clear view of what is happening in Gaza. We have not seen the kind of firefights one expects to see in urban warfare. Israel’s strategy is to protect IDF troops and to show little concern for civilian casualties. The response to the alleged presence of Hamas fighters is not to attack them from the ground but simply to obliterate them from the air. And the Israeli efforts to disrupt humanitarian aid for Gaza suggest that Netanyahu believes that every Palestinian is Hamas until proven otherwise.

Muslim and Palestinian Americans are understandably concerned about what is happening in Gaza, not to mention events in the West Bank and Lebanon. Unfortunately, President Joe Biden has a longstanding and unshakable allegiance to Israel. Despite multiple instances of disapproval by the American government of Israeli actions such as the building of illegal settlements in the West Bank, Biden’s support for Israel has shown no sign of weakening.

The present question is whether Biden’s support for Israel will be the downfall of the American Republic. Will the disgust with America’s support for Israel among certain groups of voters cause Kamala Harris to lose the presidential election to Donald Trump? Harris, as a member of the Biden Administration, is in a difficult position. Her credibility as a candidate is based partly on her contribution to that administration. Despite Harris’s decrying the suffering of Palestinians brought on by the war, serious criticism of the Biden policy would be seen as a repudiation of her own administration and a self-serving political move. It might gain pro-Palestinian votes but lose the larger, usually reliable, Jewish vote. Lacking evidence, we cannot know Harris’s true feelings about the Mideast war, though we are likely to learn should she become president.

It was reported today that the administration has given Israel a 30-day deadline to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza. The implication is that military aid may be imperiled if the situation in Gaza does not improve. Was this warning an attempt to help Harris out of her dilemma? Perhaps, but the fact that the deadline comes after the election diminishes its salience for the Harris campaign.