Category Archives: Politics

Now Is the Time

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In the mid-1960s, before the advent of the personal computer, when a manual typewriter was the state of the art in original document production, I took a high school typing course in which I learned the QWERTY keyboard and how to manipulate my fingers to put words on paper more rapidly. There were some curious practice exercises that people used to gain such mastery, memorized phrases that one might type repeatedly in order to build digital agility. One of them was this gem:

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.

Even as I wrote this now, I did not make it to the end of the sentence without a stumble. Unlike my teenage days, however, I now can simply back up and overwrite mistakes or even just rely on Microsoft Word’s spell-correct functions to fix things for me. How the world has changed. In those days, I had to laboriously apply White-Out to the page. (Millennials can be excused for looking up that brand name.)

In the woke 2020s, of course, it is perfectly appropriate to change the wording of that exercise to “all good men and women” or even “all good people.” And indeed, many of the people I will call on in this essay are women in positions of power in the United States Congress, most notably the U.S. Senate. Of the 53 Republican Senators, nine are women. That is more than enough to tip any vote in that body.

I mention this typing exercise because it always made me wonder, “when is now?” What is the crisis that would trigger this aid from all good people, and what would that aid be? In recent weeks, it has become very clear to me that now is now, and the aid is that of people with enough courage and conscience to develop a clear-eyed vision of the challenge posed by the current President of the United States. The Senate trial of the impeachment charges brought against him started this afternoon.

As sometimes happens, one can see some of the ground shifting beneath the feet of those who assumed they could respond from a position of power without response to the evidence or the larger issues surrounding the case. It has happened before, and the shifting of the ground was the fundamental reason in 1974 for the resignation of President Richard Nixon before his case ever came to trial. It is taking longer in this case simply because President Trump has thrown up one obstacle after another to prevent any witnesses from the Executive Branch, and any documents, from reaching public view. Arguing that the House should spend endless months challenging assertions of executive privilege in order to bring its case, the President and all his henchmen seem determined to run out the clock before the 2020 election. Wisely, Speaker Nancy Pelosi did not fall for this travesty and insisted on moving forward before Trump’s campaign could summon interference in another election.

The game now, in the Senate, is to claim that the House cannot bring witnesses that it failed to summon during its impeachment investigation, even though most could not be subpoenaed in a timely fashion because of White House obstruction. Despite that, a parade of good men and women, mostly civil servants and career diplomats, made their way to the House of Representatives to testify both for closed-door depositions and open hearings because now was their time to come to the aid of their country. For that, most were reviled publicly by the President himself.  We have never seen such a shameful display of executive arrogance before in American history.

The House impeachment managers, led by Rep. Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, in the last two hours as I write this, did a masterful job, in my opinion, of highlighting the hypocrisy of Trump’s allies claiming that the House should have heard from witnesses whom Trump himself barred from testifying. As the public begins to focus more closely on this point, the ground may shift some more—if not in changing votes in the Senate on the rules of the trial, then quite possibly in November when voters decide how much hypocrisy and unfairness they can stomach before they rebel.

Look, I am not a lawyer, so I am not attempting to present legal and constitutional arguments here, but as a very well-informed citizen, I am more than entitled to introduce some moral and intellectual perspective. The Republican approach in both houses of Congress has struck me as a competition to produce the best imitation of Sgt. Schultz from the silly 1960s television show, Hogan’s Heroes, which featured some ingenious Allied prisoners of war in a German stalag during World War II. Schultz was known for turning a blind eye when Col. Hogan engaged in some forbidden antics, always using the stock line, “I see nothing,” enunciated with a heavy German accent.

But it may also be a grand imitation of the three wise monkeys of Japanese legend, See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Speak No Evil, each of whom participated in a charade to avoid seeing the obvious. After all, if President Trump insists his phone call with Ukrainian President Zelenskiy was “perfect,” then there must be no reason to examine the evidence, right? So, let’s hear the arguments first in the Senate trial, and decide later whether we wish to view documents or hear from witnesses. If it weren’t such tragic farce, it might make for good material for a Saturday Night Live skit. But sometimes, the truth is so baldly scary that any potential humor associated with it fades into the shadows.

I say that because the evidence is mounting that Trump simply does not understand, or does not wish to understand, that presidential power is not and never has been unlimited under Article II of the U.S. Constitution. No previous president has assumed that he was entitled simply to do whatever he wanted. Respect for the U.S. Constitution, to which each swore an oath to “protect and defend,” and a sense of patriotic honor about protecting democracy itself, restrained their worst impulses. Until now.

It so happened that, over the recent holidays, I discovered and read a short biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Radical Integrity: The Story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer), the German Lutheran pastor who in the 1930s and 1940s undertook to oppose the rise of Adolf Hitler. Ultimately, he was involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler in the waning days of the war. With just a month left before Germany surrendered in May 1945, the Nazi authorities, with an eye to avenging any opposition to Hitler, executed him at Flossenburg prison. To this day, he is regarded as a religious and patriotic martyr for standing up to tyranny under the Nazi regime. He knew the consequences he faced, and he was not deterred. I have long known about Bonhoeffer but had not read his story in depth. The short, popularized version by Michael Van Dyke resulted in my tracking down (through colleague Allison Hardin as I was recovering from surgery) the full 1,000-page biography from 1970 by close Bonhoeffer associate and seminarian Eberhard Bethge (Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography). I aim to read it in full in the coming months.

I mention it because, in staring down the intimidation practiced by Donald Trump, the relentless shredding of opponents’ reputations, the ignorance of history accompanied by thirst for power that characterizes his presidency, and the inability to acknowledge, let alone apologize for, error under any circumstances, no one is asking anyone in Congress to put his or her life on the line in the way that Bonhoeffer and similar principled critics of tyranny were willing to do. They may fear losing a Republican primary as a result of Trump ginning up his base, but there is life after politics, and certainly life after a single defeat by the followers of a president who is likely to be a spent force in American politics within five years. The question is one of having sufficient courage and integrity to challenge this march toward authoritarianism while it still matters. Political self-preservation in the short term is a very myopic goal. Abraham Lincoln lost re-election to the U.S. House because of his opposition to the Mexican-American War, only to resurface a dozen years later as one of the greatest presidents in American history.

But alas, it appears that when the time comes for someone to write the story of the 53 Republican Senators in the 116th Congress, they may need to reverse the title of President John F. Kennedy’s famous book and call theirs Profiles in Cowardice. But we shall see. There is always the opportunity for a miracle of conscience. Some good people may yet come to the aid of their country.

Jim Schwab

Climate News from Florida and California

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Warning to readers: This is not my usual single-focus essay. It is a collage of news from two coastal states with an assortment of serious natural hazards challenges—Florida and California. In recent years, their politics has tended to diverge widely, but perhaps we are seeing a welcome convergence to some degree around climate issues. It is about time: Both face severe and unrelenting challenges, and there is little time to waste in identifying and implementing effective solutions.

Let’s start with Florida.

For starters, they are getting significant help from The Nature Conservancy (TNC), an organization that has long performed great work in preserving open space and researching the values of green infrastructure. For years, I have heard about the merits of coastal mangroves in mitigating hazards such as storm surge and coastal erosion. Recently, TNC employed an insurance industry catastrophe model to quantity the economic benefits of mangrove forests for reducing coastal storm damages in Collier County, and from Hurricane Irma, which struck parts of Florida in 2017. For those unfamiliar with the area, Collier County is in southwest Florida running from Naples on the Gulf of Mexico coast east into the Big Cypress Nature Preserve, which lies just north of Everglades National Park.

To quote the TNC website, “Many areas in the county received over $1 million in benefits every year in flood damage reduction benefits due to the mangroves in front of them.” Moreover, “Mangroves averted $1.5 billion in storm damages, amounting to a 25% savings in counties that have mangroves. They also protected more than 626,000 people across Florida.” You can access the full report, Valuing the Flood Risk Reduction Benefits of Florida’s Mangroves, here.

While TNC could be expected to take climate change and natural hazards seriously, Florida Republican officials are another matter. It is thus heartwarming to learn in a new Associated Press article that first-term Gov. Ron DeSantis has helped turn the page, along with some Republican lawmakers, on the climate denial that prevailed under his predecessor and now current U.S. Senator, Rick Scott. It also appears that Sen. Marco Rubio has joined a bipartisan Senate Climate Solutions Caucus launched in October. While one should not expect the sort of wholehearted embrace of climate issues that one sees among progressive Democrats, that is not necessary for one to appreciate the value of a return to a bipartisan approach to an issue where Republican support (and connection to reality) has in recent years been woefully lacking, especially under President Trump. Shifting public perceptions have driven political change in both California and Florida, and it is about time. Southern Florida has been awash in nuisance flooding driven by sea level rise, and pollution has threatened the environmental viability of the Everglades. If Republicans are finding a need to appeal to voters through climate action, that is, on balance, a far better thing for the political system than a hyper-partisan battle of acceptance of reality versus denial. It is also not surprising that two highly vulnerable states with major natural hazard threats would be in the forefront.

Of course, California under former Gov. Jerry Brown went all in on confronting climate change, in part because of the motivating impact of increasingly frequent and violent wildfires and lengthening wildfire seasons. If anything, current Gov. Gavin Newsom may be picking up the pace, but it is worth nothing that even former Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has long acknowledged climate change and advocated effective state and federal action in response. But let me keep this post short and to the point. I recently taped some introductory material for new additions to the American Planning Association’s Resilience Roundtable podcast series, for which I will soon be moderating several new installments to be released in the coming year. But two new podcasts involve interviews by Prof. William Siembieda of California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, with planners from Butte County. The first is already available, in which he discusses the impact and recovery from the Camp Fire, which destroyed much of the city of Paradise, with senior planner Dan Breedon. The second interview will appear on the Resilience Roundtable page soon.

Jim Schwab

“We’re Yesterday’s News”

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That headline is a quote from Mayor Tommy Muska of the town of West, Texas, in the Dallas Morning News of November 21, regarding the Trump administration’s rescission of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards for disaster prevention in chemical facilities, issued that day.

Aerial photo of the west explosion site taken several days after blast (4/22/2013). By Shane.torgerson – Aerial photo taken from my plane Previously published: Facebook and Flickr, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25727808

So much news passes under the bridge in one month these days that readers can be forgiven if they do not immediately recall what happened in West on April 17, 2013, but my guess is that many do. Or they may if I nudge them by noting that the West Fertilizer Company suffered an explosion in a storage facility at the edge of this small city of 2,880. The explosion resulted from the combustion of ammonium nitrate, a common ingredient in fertilizer, which is notorious for its chemical instability. Still, the facility had been there since the 1960s, but West had over the years allowed a middle school, an apartment building (which was destroyed), a nursing home, and other structures to be built nearby. When the explosion occurred, 160 people were injured, 14 first responders (mostly firefighters) were killed, and one elderly man died of a heart attack as the nursing home was evacuated. All that triggered a bit of soul searching about loose regulations at all levels of government regarding the operation of such facilities, their disproportionate environmental impact on vulnerable populations, and how better to prevent future disasters.

One year later, in May 2014, I wrote in this blog about West following my own involvement on an expert panel for the federal Chemical Safety Board, which held a hearing in West on the anniversary of the disaster. I raised some pertinent questions about Texas chemical and fire safety regulation that were of interest to the board.

In the meantime, however, moves were afoot in the Obama administration to respond to the larger questions of chemical facility accidents. According to Earthjustice, an environmental advocacy group, in the decade up to the West accident the U.S. had experienced 2,200 chemical accidents at hazardous facilities, two-thirds of which caused reported harm, including 59 deaths and more than 17,000 people injured, hospitalized, or seeking medical care. As a result, President Obama signed on August 1, 2013, Executive Order 13650, “Improving Chemical Facility Safety and Security,” which set in motion a rule-making procedure at the U.S. EPA. By July 31, 2013, EPA issued a Risk Management Program request for information in the Federal Register, proposed new rules on March 14, 2016, and finalized the new rule, known for short as the Chemical Disaster Rule, on January 13, 2017, with one week remaining before President Trump took office.

The final rule is a bit complex, using 112 pages of the Federal Register, but among other items specifically required a “root cause analysis” as part of an incident investigation to determine what “could have reasonably resulted in a catastrophic release.” It would also require compliance audits after reported incidents and required all facilities with certain processes to conduct annual notification exercises to ensure that emergency contact information was complete. The overall idea was to improve effective coordination with local emergency responders. One problem that caused fatalities in West was a lack of firefighter awareness of the precise contents and dangers of the facility that exploded. Thus, the requirements in the rule for field and tabletop exercises. Finally, the rule aimed to enhance the availability of information about chemical hazards in these facilities including sharing such information with local emergency planning committees.

The rest is almost entirely predictable. With little grasp of public policy but considerable animus toward anything with Obama’s name on it, Trump put his appointees to work undoing his legacy. That included action by then EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt on March 16, 2017, in response to an industry-sponsored petition, to announce a 90-day stay of the Obama-era rules, followed by an extension to 20 months shortly thereafter. In the meantime, Louisiana and 10 other states, including Texas, petitioned for reconsideration of the Obama rules. The delay would last until February 19, 2019. However, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, responding to a petition from environmental groups, vacated the Trump rulemaking. But now we have a final rule from the Trump EPA officially rescinding the Chemical Disaster Rule.

The public information aspect of the rule became a target, with the Trump administration claiming it was responding to homeland security and emergency management experts who feared that such information would become a target for terrorists. However, it would seem to me that far more people have been affected by routine chemical accidents than by any terrorist incidents at such facilities. The U.S. EPA also noted that the rules would not have prevented the accident at West because it was ultimately determined to have been caused by arson. It is worth noting, however, that most of the first responder fatalities in that incident were more credibly the result of a lack of training and information on the potential explosiveness of the materials involved, which might have prompted greater caution and different tactics by firefighters. And none of this answers the questions I raised in my 2014 blog post about land-use practices and limitations on fire safety codes in Texas.

So, back to Mayor Muska, who is reportedly disappointed with the outcome, and for good reason. His town has to live with the results of the 2013 explosion, which decimated the volunteer firefighter staff and obliterated a local business (and employer). Muska was mayor when the disaster happened and is now serving his fifth term. I think it is worth sharing the comments he made in the final two paragraphs of the Dallas Morning News story:

“The American people and American politicians, they have a short memory,” Muska said. “They’re going to say everything is fine, and every few years something like this is going to happen again, and ‘Oh, yeah, we need to look at this again.’

“We’re yesterday’s news. It’s not on anybody’s minds as it was in ’13 and ’14.”

Jim Schwab

About Blowing That Whistle

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For the last four weeks, I have failed to find adequate time to write a respectable blog post. Events and past commitments have gotten the best of me. I spent four days in Iowa during the first week of this month, and two days in North Carolina the following week. In between, I was racing to stay ahead of the demands of my online teaching for the University of Iowa. One surprise request for consulting work intervened on a very short-term basis.

Why do I mention this?

Because, despite that drought of blog production, this blog has been gaining new subscribers by the hundreds weekly, a trend still underway. It seems logical to conclude, without any new posts, that the most recent article, “If You See Something, Say Something,” from September 22, remains the driving force. When I wrote it, however, I thought it an interesting turn of phrase but hardly the most interesting overall post I had ever written. I had modest expectations for the reaction it would get, and that seemed confirmed by an underwhelming reaction on Facebook.

I believe I underestimated the utterly accidental convergence of events. It was not long after that post that a whistleblower in the U.S. national security establishment complained formally about President Trump’s telephone call with Ukrainian President Volodomir Zelenskiy, in which, the White House summary of the call later revealed, Trump pressed Zelenskiy to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden in return for the sale of needed weapons for Ukraine to defend itself against Russia and Russian-allied separatists. That set in motion an entire train of revelations including testimony by current and former diplomats and other officials. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced a formal impeachment inquiry. The house of cards in the White House has been tumbling ever since.

I simply had the dumb luck of writing what I wrote and asking citizens to become whistleblowers to save American democracy right before one of the most consequential series of events in modern presidential history. I have no doubt that my increased readership is simply the product of people searching for content on whistleblowing and similar subjects and stumbling into my blog. I can say that I am glad so many of you liked what you saw and decided to stay. But be prepared for me to explore many other subjects in coming weeks and months.

Why?

More than six years ago, after I had initiated the blog, I wrestled with its focus. Experienced blog writers seemed to suggest one needed a “subject” for a blog. What was mine? I was not entirely sure. Every subject I considered seemed insufficient.

I was an urban planner. I was an author. I loved literature. I read a lot of books and did not mind reviewing some of them. I had religious and moral beliefs and perspectives that had evolved over decades. I graduated with a B.A. in political science but later earned degrees in journalism and urban and regional planning. I had become a disaster planning expert. I did not feel whole without embracing the full extent of my far-ranging curiosity.

One morning I awoke with a special insight. The blog, I decided, was about whatever I damn well chose to write about on that day. It would express everything I had to offer, everything I felt competent to discuss. That was in 2013. It was three years later before the turn in American politics concerned me to the point that I also felt strongly that expressing my opposition to some current developments was simply a response to my own moral and intellectual center, politics notwithstanding. I would say whatever I felt I needed to say. Every so often, the urge would emerge, and I would somehow find words to say something unique.

One never knows how what one must say feeds into the larger community or national narrative. It is the role of faith to help one make that leap and join the dialogue. And that’s all I did four weeks ago. But I am overjoyed to have so many of you join me. It makes me want to wake up in the morning and write something. Stay tuned. More is coming.

Jim Schwab

If You See Something, Say Something

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National Park Service photo

We have become so accustomed to a certain Homeland Security phrase since the events of September 11, 2001, that we have never seriously contemplated its larger meaning. “If you see something, say something,” for most people simply means that, if you notice something strange, someone leaving a package on a train platform and walking away, for instance, you need to call 911 or point it out to a nearby security official. Having done our civic duty, we can go on about our lives and hope for the best. We may save someone’s life, or we may simply be exercising caution. Check it out.

But suppose we interpreted that phrase in the context of our duties as citizens of an endangered, or even potentially endangered, democracy. Suppose the threat were to our democratic institutions and not just to the lives of those in a single public place. Suppose the threat involved policies that affected thousands of people threatened by racism, ignorance, or hatred? Ought we not to speak up? How different would the history of the world have been if millions of Germans had spoken up about what they saw even in 1933? How many Russians in the past two decades have risked their lives and their careers to speak up about the threats they see to a democracy being strangled in its cradle? In the past year, the people of Sudan have arisen against a brutal military dictatorship and forced remarkable changes. Are we Americans somehow so special as to be free from such obligations? Do we not eventually lose our moral authority to speak for democracy in the world if we fail to speak for it at home?

If you see something, say something. Let me tell you what I see:

I see children housed in filthy cages at the southern border by the U.S. government, separated from their parents, their eyes full of fear and bewilderment, when their only alleged crime was to be brought here by parents from Central America who sought to remove them from gang warfare, violence, crime, and corruption in desperately poor countries. I see a U.S. President, as a form of retribution, cutting aid to those countries that was meant to promote reform and economic opportunity to reduce people’s need to flee such chaos in the first place.

I see Temporary Protective Status (TPS) denied to survivors of Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas, a neighboring country with deep ties to the U.S., even as that nation struggles to rescue and house its own people in the face of mind-numbing devastation. The rationale from the President was that “very bad people” would harm our country if this were allowed, although TPS has been standard practice in the past in the very same circumstances. It is unclear, other than being people of color, what makes the Bahamians especially dangerous in his eyes.

I see neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and Ku Klux Klan members marching and chanting “Jews will not replace us” through the campus of the University of Virginia and the streets of Charlottesville, defended ardently by a President who sees “very fine people” on both sides while an innocent young woman is run over and killed by a young Nazi sympathizer with his car. I see this rhetoric emboldening an ever-widening circle of mass shooters who sow terror in American cities with unlimited access to weapons of war, but I also see a widening circle of brave citizens rising to demand effective action against such terror.

I see America losing the moral courage of the Emma Lazarus poem at the Statue of Liberty, pleading for the world to “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” and nearly mocking Lady Liberty as she seeks to lift her lamp beside the golden door. The Golden Door is becoming instead the Great Border Wall built with money never legitimately appropriated by Congress, and members of the President’s own party unable and unwilling to stop him or even raise the weakest of objections lest they be expelled from the halls of power—or are they becoming halls of obeisance, like the Roman Senate in Nero’s time?

I am telling you what I see because I understand the moral and civic obligation to say something. We must all be whistleblowers for the future of democracy. What do you see? Are you prepared to say something as well? And what shall we do once we have spoken?

Jim Schwab

Ghosts in the Schoolyard

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In 2013, the board of education of the Chicago Public Schools succeeded in closing 50 neighborhood schools, an action fully supported by Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Of these, 90 percent had a majority of African American students, who comprised 80 percent of students in the closed schools. These, in turn, comprised fully one-fourth of the city’s schools with a majority of both African American students and African American faculty.

Chicago is not a city where people take abuse and discrimination lightly. Predictably, many parents in the affected neighborhoods rose up in civic rebellion. At Dyett High School, they launched a hunger strike to make their feelings known. Protesters succeeded in keeping Dyett open, but overall, little of this had any effect because Chicago has the only unelected school board in the state of Illinois. Instead, courtesy of special state legislation, the mayor appoints the members, who respond to the mayor, not the voters. Recent mayors have liked it that way.

If you imagine that this might be a political issue, you are exactly right. In the mayoral election that just last month culminated with the election of Lori Lightfoot, both she and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle vowed support for creating an elected school board. These two had emerged as the leading vote-getters from a mayoral field of 17 in the nonpartisan primary after Emanuel declined to seek reelection. As with many such things, the details will matter greatly in negotiations with legislators in Springfield, but Lightfoot’s 73 percent mandate unquestionably gives her considerable elbow room in the discussion. But such an outcome of the often harsh and certainly vigorous debate was hardly on the horizon when the closings occurred. So, too, was the explosive controversy over the police murder of Laquan MacDonald in 2014 until court-ordered release of the video exposed the official police explanation of the 17-year-old’s death as highly inaccurate. That set the stage for Emanuel’s exit from City Hall.

But back to the story of the school closings. This set of events helped to poison relations between Emanuel and much of the black community in Chicago even before the MacDonald shooting became the linchpin for relations with the Chicago Police Department. Lightfoot’s claim to fame—and she rose to challenge Emanuel even before he decided not to run—was her role in police administrative reform.

With permission from University of Chicago Press

In her new book released last year, Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side (University of Chicago Press), Eve L. Ewing, assistant professor in the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, tackles the 2013 events to share with us why this was not just a one-off mistake by some misguided board members and school administrators, but part of a long history of institutional racism in the Chicago system. The closings did not happen in a vacuum; there was no blank slate. There was, instead, a powerful legacy of devaluing black students and their neighborhoods that played a significant role in the clash of world views between the powerful and the disempowered.

History matters. Ewing takes time to elucidate the migrations of southern blacks between the world wars to northern cities including Chicago. This was the origin of what has become known as the Bronzeville neighborhood on the South Side. Ewing notes that the black population in Chicago grew 360 percent in just two decades. However, while many other ethnic groups immigrating to Chicago developed enclaves by choice, blacks were forced to do so through a segregation enforced not by law, but by bombings and violence. Blacks attempting to move into white neighborhoods faced serious retribution. From 1917 to 1921, she notes, 58 bombs “struck the homes of black residents, of bankers who gave the mortgages, or of real estate agents who sold them property.” This was an average of one bombing every 20 days. It is not hard to imagine how this produced an intimidating effect for all concerned. The result was a ghetto in which blacks were confined in increasingly dense concentrations, eventually culminating in the infamous housing projects that lined the major corridors of the South Side. But we get ahead of ourselves here. In order to squeeze growing numbers of the southern arrivals into the same housing stock in a geographically confined area, landlords began to carve up existing units into ever smaller ones that came to be known as “kitchenettes,” often violating building codes and safety standards. Gwendolyn Brooks, the famous African-American poet laureate of Illinois, memorialized these housing atrocities in her poem, “Kitchenette Building.”

Ewing discusses her book in an April lecture at DePaul University.

That, in turn, led to overcrowded schools in the affected neighborhoods, accompanied by the morally constipated unwillingness of powerful school officials to consider integrating schools or allocating substantial resources to those neighborhoods to allow their schools to work. Instead, Superintendent Benjamin Willis took over in 1953, in an era when schools did not systematically collect racial data and he could somewhat disingenuously proclaim himself color-blind. As Ewing observes, “Local black leaders were not convinced.” This was, after all, also the time of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, in which the United States Supreme Court ordered desegregation of public schools and overturned the philosophy of “separate but equal.” In time, Willis implemented a policy that placed black students in overcrowded schools in temporary aluminum auxiliary trailers that were soon derided as “Willis wagons,” while students attended for half-days while the affected schools ran double shifts.

By 1961, Ewing states, “tensions were flaring,” and a coalition of civil rights groups undertook efforts to enroll black students in white schools, where they were turned away despite vacancies. Operation Transfer served to expose the inherent discrimination in the system. Other forms of direct action followed, including black mothers visiting white schools to document open spaces (they were arrested for trespassing), and lying down in front of bulldozers preparing the ground for more trailers. Finally, the stage was set for a mass walkout on October 22, 1963, “Freedom Day,” in which more than 220,000 students boycotted school.

In short, the protests of 2013 had plenty of precedent, and the closings struck black parents not as an attempt to improve the education of their children—in areas losing population largely as a result of the demolition of the same public housing that once confined them—but as the destruction of families and networks that had grown in those neighborhoods over time. The full story is more complex and richly textured, but you begin to get the idea. Yet, the denial of this impact of history, and the insistence that new policies under Emanuel were somehow part of a clean slate to give disadvantaged students a fresh start, even as many had to cross gang lines and lost their lives to gun violence as they attended newly assigned schools, persisted.

That brings us to Barbara Byrd-Bennett, a black school superintendent chosen by Emanuel, who led the school closings. The fact that she was later convicted and imprisoned for taking kickbacks from a former employer and CPS contractor, escapes only those who suffer from a deprived sense of irony. Confronted at a public meeting with accusations of racism that touched a raw nerve, she reacted: “What I cannot understand, and will not accept, is that the proposals I am offering are racist. That is an affront to me as a woman of color.”

Ewing goes on, after quoting Byrd-Bennett at greater length, not only to examine the personal umbrage that Byrd-Bennett expressed, but the larger context of institutional racism, and the underlying question of why the schools in question were “underutilized” and “under-resourced” in the first place. After all, someone had made critical decisions to reallocate resources to charter schools and away from the very schools that were now being criticized for underperforming despite the clear history of policies that had helped make them so. The feeling of betrayal among parents and students in the schools facing closure was palpable, and the emotional commitment that led to a hunger strike was real. The fact that, yet again, the system found a way to turn a deaf ear to those who pleaded with the board to reconsider its approach spoke volumes about where power resided. There were numerous factors that led to this year’s election outcome, which also produced a growing progressive caucus in the City Council, but these battles over schools were surely among them.

The richness of Ewing’s book is much deeper than I can portray here, so I urge those interested in the topic to read it. Chicago is not alone in facing serious issues concerning the future of its public schools and fairness in the distribution of educational resources, so this book is not just for Chicago. It is for America.

Now, time for full disclosure: First, I was on a panel of three judges for the Society of Midland Authors that chose this book for honorable mention in adult nonfiction in our annual book awards context. That award will be bestowed at a banquet on May 14. Second, my wife is a retired Chicago Public Schools teacher and Chicago Teachers Union activist who wrote about the Dyett hunger strike and other actions against the school closings at the time they were happening. Her concern for students is not abstract and policy-driven but visceral and personal after decades in the classroom. There are many opinions about education policy in Chicago, but after three decades in the classroom, she has earned a right to hers.

Jim Schwab

Why I Agree with Mother Jones

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Personally, I would rather be learning or teaching than shouting on any given day.

Last night, I read one of those publisher columns that are often boring and laborious, but this one nailed it. Mother Jones CEO Monika Bauerlein recounted a conversation with a veteran editor she admires who inquired about the partisan bias he perceived in the monthly magazine. Unquestionably, the magazine is known for a left-wing tilt, but it should be better known for its investigative reporting and willingness to ask hard questions. Over the years, after all, Mother Jones has not gone out of its way to spare Democrats, but it certainly is riding herd on President Donald Trump.

And for good reason, although Trump is a symptom of a problem and not its origin. He is exploiting deep divisions and tribal instincts in a nation that seems unsure what it wants, but much of which is troubled by the extent of the deception, corruption, and amorality of the current administration. Bauerlein insists that the media can “stand for something” while remaining fair and accurate in its reporting, and I agree. She also notes that trying to report from the middle while merely relaying contrasting statements from “both sides” of the political spectrum is really reporting from nowhere because it lacks a moral anchor. There are multiple reasons for asking tough questions and engaging in investigative reporting, but two stand out: 1) Public officials often, but not always, cut corners, lie, or shade the truth to advance their own ambitions or protect the tribe; and 2) such questions are the ingredients of serious analysis that gets to the bottom of a problem and advances the quality of our national dialogue. Surely, the latter has been hitting new lows in recent years.

So, my title for this post does not mean that I always agree with everything I find in Mother Jones, nor does it mean that the magazine expects that all its readers will do so all the time. The real point is to advance the quality of the dialogue. And in that respect, I think publications like Mother Jones are essential to the survival of American democracy.

The subject of the purpose of the news media has always intrigued me, in part because, in addition to my M.A. in urban and regional planning from the University of Iowa, I also earned a second M.A. in journalism, way back in 1985. I recall a class conversation with one local newspaper editor. He clearly adhered to a school of thought that held that reporters need to be objectively neutral at all times. When someone asked him about news coverage of third parties, he noted that they got little coverage because they had such limited followings, so the focus was on the “two sides”—the Republicans and Democrats. When that person followed up by asking how third parties would ever get a hearing if all the news media followed that logic, he had no good answer. What we heard was mostly pre-Internet circular logic. We will cover such movements when they matter, and they won’t matter until we cover them. The shallowness of the paradigm of “two sides” immediately struck me: The media seeing itself as impartial mediator was an inadequate framework for finding the truth, which is not always or necessarily located in the middle. (Anyone still believe in slavery?) As Bauerlein observes, the middle moves, depending on how the two sides are defined. It matters whether the right is John McCain or Steve Bannon, whether the left is Nancy Pelosi or the Socialist Workers Party. And no, they are not the same. Where was the middle in Hitler’s Germany? Where was the middle in the segregated, Jim Crow South? Where is the middle when voter rights are being suppressed, so that some less privileged citizens are denied a voice through the ballot box? Whose voice matters (or should)?

Ultimately, it is not partisan to insist on accuracy, truth, human decency, and honesty. It is simply good for democracy and good for society. It is not helpful, on the other hand, simply to accept undocumented Twitter-fed nonsense from a President, a Congressman, or any other public figure without subjecting it to some standards of accuracy, which is why the Washington Post has maintained its inventory of more than 5,000 false or misleading statements by Trump since he took office. It may not be feasible for the Post alone to maintain such an inventory for everyone in a prominent political position, but he is the President, after all, and there are other Internet platforms for tracking political honesty among lower candidates and office holders of all parties at the federal, state, and local levels. These are not partisan sites, for the most part, but they are important tools for voters and activists who want to assess the accuracy of what they hear and read.

One reason I chose to react to Bauerlein’s comments is that they also touched upon  much of my own philosophy regarding this blog. When I launched “Home of the Brave” in April 2013, I had no idea who would be reading it, or how many, but now there are nearly 19,000 subscribers, and probably some smaller number of regular visitors who have not yet chosen to register a subscription. I get virtually nothing out of the enterprise except the deep satisfaction of sharing knowledge and perspectives, but being a veteran planning professional as well as a trained journalist, the quality and reputation of what I publish is central to my identity. I also recognize special responsibilities once a readership grows to that size. While I certainly have a point of view on numerous topics, I have sought to emphasize research and analysis over advocacy. Indeed, given my penchant for taking readers deep into the subject matter in my own areas of expertise, while insistently using plain English, I have been pleasantly surprised at how many people have chosen to read this blog on a regular basis. I would rather slake a popular appetite for truth than simply express opinions. If I get something wrong, and someone can prove it, I want to hear from them. To that end, my reading diet is aggressive, and I try to share what I learn when I think I have discovered something that matters. I am always open to recommendations regarding new books and research reports. All the best journalists I have ever known have been equally ravenous readers. It is their best defense against “fake news.” They are not only not the enemy of the people; they are vital resources for a thoughtful public.

If only we could retrain more of America to step outside its current groupthink and exercise their mental muscles to question, not just react, to be open to new information, and to value independent thought, we might get past our current bumper-sticker debates and engage in some serious, rational conversation. And we might learn to show more mutual respect for what we all have to offer.

Jim Schwab

The Predictable Impact of Florence

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Flooding in Rosewood in Horry County, SC, September 24, 2018 (All photos by Allison Hardin with exceptions of FEMA photo from Hurricane Floyd and Charlotte image.)

It has been a few weeks of drought on this blog, but just the opposite in North Carolina, where Hurricane Florence dropped up to 30 inches of rain in some locations, and floods migrated downstream via numerous rivers to swamp cities both inland and near the coast. Now, Hurricane Michael threatens to compound the damage as it migrates northeast from its powerful Category 4 assault on the Florida Panhandle, with storm surges up to 14 feet in areas just east of the eye, which made landfall near Panama City.

The blog drought was the result of both a bit of writer’s block, mostly induced by a busy schedule that included two conference trips over the past three weeks, combined with a bit of fatigue and a few significant diversions of my personal time. But that may be okay. My intent was to write about the recent hurricane along the East Coast, and sometimes letting the subject ferment in the mind results in a more thorough and insightful perspective. I hope that is the result here.

Storms never happen in a vacuum. In a world with relatively few uninhabited places, their impact is the result more of patterns of human development and the legacy of past choices in land use and building practices than of the storm itself, which is, after all, simply a natural and very predictable event. Hurricanes were part of the natural cycle on this earth long before humans took over the planet (or thought they did).

Hurricane wind warning at bridge in Socastee, South Carolina

But they appear to be getting worse, and climate change, most of it almost surely attributable to human activity, is an increasingly evident factor. Meteorologist Ken Kunkel, affiliated both with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and North Carolina State University, stated that Florence produced more rain than any other storm in the last 70 years except for Hurricane Harvey last year. According to Kunkel, five weather stations over an area of 14,000 square miles in the Carolinas recorded an average of 17.5 inches. Harvey’s average was 25.6 inches. By comparison, Chicago averages about 37 inches for an entire year. Such heightened precipitation levels are in line with expected impacts of climate change.

What became obvious to me early on was that Florence would rehash a certain amount of unfortunate North Carolina history regarding feedlot agriculture. I am familiar with that history because 20 years ago I authored a Planning Advisory Service Report (#482) for the American Planning Association, titled Planning and Zoning for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. (In that same year, APA also published PAS 483/484, Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction, for which I was the lead author and project manager.) I want to emphasize that what happened in North Carolina was not unusual. Nationwide, many states have laws dating to the 1950s that exempt all or most agricultural operations from county zoning ordinances. Most of these were intended to create a friendly regulatory environment for family farms, and they were often followed by other “right-to-farm” laws designed to shield farmers using conventional farming methods from nuisance lawsuits. Only later, as the large feedlots known also by the acronym “CAFO” became widespread, did it become clear that such exemptions, by then fiercely defended by industry groups, became giant loopholes for the detrimental environmental impacts of such operations. This story has been repeated in Iowa, Missouri, Utah, and numerous other states.

In North Carolina in 1991, State Senator Wendell Murphy, who owned a direct interest in the growing Murphy Family Farms, engineered passage of a law widening the state’s exemptions to include CAFOs. Within two years, as I noted in the report, North Carolina’s hog population shot up from 2.8 million to 4.6 million. Today, the number is at least 9 million. A public backlash at the impacts of CAFOs resulted in a new law in 1997 that included a moratorium on new waste lagoons, but by then, although the hogs were firmly ensconced in a growing number of feedlots, the figurative horse was out of the barn. Many counties in eastern North Carolina, where the industry was concentrated, were slow or reluctant to use their newly regained powers. In any case, various large operators were effectively already grandfathered into continued existence. Today, consolidation within the industry has left Smithfield Foods in possession of most of the business in North Carolina, yet Smithfield itself was acquired by the Chinese-owned WH Group several years ago.

Grenville, NC, September 24, 1999 — The livestock loss and potential health hazard to Eastern North Carolina is huge. Here volunteers have towed in dead and floating cattle from a nearby ranch at Pactolus, NC (just North of Greenville), trying to remove them as fast as possible to lower the potential health hazards associated.
Photo by Dave Gatley/ FEMA News Photo

Along came Hurricane Floyd in 1999. The low-lying plains of eastern North Carolina, always vulnerable to flooding, were deeply awash, but worse, filled with millions of pigs and poultry and their excrement in manure lagoons. Hurricane Dennis just weeks earlier had dumped 15 inches of rain on the region, and Floyd dumped even more in some areas. The Tar and Neuse Rivers, among others, badly overflowed their banks and inundated numerous farms. More than 110,000 hog carcasses, and more than 1 million chicken and turkey carcasses, floated downriver while waste lagoons were breached, creating a stench-filled public health disaster only partly solved when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency brought in huge incinerators to burn carcasses, though most animals were buried. It was a fiasco that did not have to happen at the scale on which it occurred.

Fast forward to this year and Hurricane Florence, presuming a surfeit of lessons to be learned from the 1999 disaster as well as later storms. As Emily Moon notes in the Pacific Standard, North Carolina has had opportunities over the past 20 years to introduce serious regulatory change, but various factors foiled those chances, and North Carolina remains the nation’s second-largest hog producer, having pushed aside every state but Iowa. The industry has evolved, but the problem remains. The state has bought out 46 operations since 1999 and shut down their lagoons, but the vast majority remain in operation. The numbers changed in Florence—more than 3 million chickens and 5,500 hogs dead and afloat in the flood waters—but the devastation rooted in CAFO practices continued. Coal ash landfills associated with power stations added to the environmental impacts. And the beat goes on, in a part of the state heavily populated by African-Americans, many too poor and powerless to challenge the system effectively without outside help.

I mention all this aside from the obvious human tragedies of lost lives, ruined homes, and prolonged power outages affecting some 740,000 homes and businesses.

Flooding at Arrowhead Development in Myrtle Beach, SC, September 26, 2018

Still, there are significant lessons available from Hurricane Florence outside the realm of mass production of poultry and hogs, and I want to offer a positive note. One is that, while only about 35 percent of properties at risk of flooding in North Carolina have flood insurance, which is available from the National Flood Insurance Program, neighboring South Carolina ranked second in the nation with 65 percent coverage. While I do not know all the details behind that sizable difference, it seems to me there is surely something to be learned from a comparison of these results and how they were achieved. They come in the context of a “moonshot” by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to double flood insurance coverage nationally by 2022. That will happen when South Carolina becomes the norm rather than the exception. Sometimes we can use these events to push in the right direction. Texas, for instance, has added 145,000 new flood insurance policies in effect since Hurricane Harvey; the question will be whether the new awareness wears off as memory of Harvey fades, or whether the state can solidify those gains. For that matter, can the states in the Southeast—the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida—leverage the lessons of Florence and Michael to push in the same direction?

Hidden Valley drainage restoration project, Charlotte, NC. Image courtesy of Tim Trautman.

Recently, Bloomberg Business News offered an example within North Carolina of how differently floodplains could be managed by highlighting the case of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. I worked for several years in a series of training workshops on flood resilience with Tim Trautman, the manager for the engineering and mitigation program for Mecklenburg Storm Water Services, so I am familiar with their intriguing story. The county for many years has used a stormwater utility fee on property owners to fund its own hazard mitigation program, using the money to buy out flood-prone properties and increase open space in its floodplains. The result has been a significant reduction in flood-prone land and buildings. The question is not whether Charlotte is successful, but what state and federal programs and authorities can do to encourage and support such efforts and make them more commonplace.

Every serious disaster offers lessons and opportunities, and I am not attempting here to pick on North Carolina alone. Other states face their own challenges; Iowa, for one, is undergoing a somewhat muted debate about the impact of its own farm practices on downstream flooding and water quality, in part as an outgrowth of the 2008 floods. What is important is that we use these windows of opportunity, the “teachable moments,” as they are sometimes known, to initiate the changes that are surely needed for the long term in creating more resilient, environmentally healthy communities. What we do not need is a natural disaster version of Groundhog Day.

Jim Schwab

Standards of Public Behavior

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Like John McCain’s assuredly final book, The Restless Wave, I read Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence, by James R. Clapper, in large part because my wife bought it for me. The usual pathway to my desk for books I discuss in this blog is that they get sent as review copies from a publisher.

Not so in this case. Jean follows much more news in her retirement, hears about books by current and former public officials, and occasionally chooses to bring one to my attention by buying it. She knows that I am likely to read it, though it may take a while if I get bogged down with other business. I am also unlikely to read the entire spate of such books in this age of Trump because I don’t have enough time. They seem to be multiplying like rabbits.

Clapper is quite clear that he never envisioned writing such a book until he retired, in large part because, as a largely nonpolitical intelligence officer, his accustomed role was to lie low and avoid publicity. At the peak of his career, as the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) under President Barack Obama, he says, he saw his mission as “speaking truth to power.” Like any other high-ranking administration official, Clapper had better and worse days, agreements and disagreements, with the President, but retained a deep respect for the occupant of the office both because of the importance of that office and the dignity of the individual performing the job. Any individual who has ever held a responsible position in business or in public life knows well the profound difference between disagreement and disrespect. In the end, the boss calls the shots. Moreover, Clapper makes clear that, as first a military officer, and then a civilian intelligence professional following his retirement from the Air Force, he served under successive administrations of both parties and retained the same respect for those above him.

He spends most of the book laying the groundwork for the final chapters about life at or near the top of the system. He details his childhood, in which he once managed inadvertently to hack through his family’s television into the communications system of the Philadelphia police, into college and the Air Force and training as a military intelligence officer. Like most public servants, he did not perform his job in his early years with any expectation of someday becoming the nation’s chief intelligence officer. He simply grew into a role that eventually put him repeatedly in front of congressional committees, testifying at hearings about everything from Benghazi to budgets to Russian meddling in the 2016 election. The time he invests in illuminating a background that has otherwise been largely out of the limelight helps us to understand the journey he has made from a lowly son of another itinerant military professional to someone with deep insights into where the nation has lately gone astray.

It is almost surely the unnerving experience of watching Donald Trump become president, even as the evidence of Russian meddling in the U.S. election system was mushrooming—much of which he was at times unable to discuss because the information was classified, or the investigation was underway and under the purview of the FBI, not the DNI—that seems to have dislodged any reservations he once had about sharing this story in a memoir. Like McCain, he uses the aid of a speechwriter, but neither man ever set out to be a professional writer. Still, it is perfectly clear that it is Clapper who assembled the facts for this intriguing book. The insights are clearly his own.

What troubles Clapper is hardly surprising, once one understands the philosophy that has guided his career, one commonly shared among lifelong public servants. There are certain expectations of loyalty to the nation, of the dignity of public service, and of public decency that seem to drive Clapper. No doubt, these motivations also affect many others on the growing list of critics whom President Donald Trump has recently targeted for loss of their security clearances. The sheer amateurishness of this dangerously autocratic move on Trump’s part, already applied to former CIA Director John Brennan, is apparent from the fact that several people on the announced list of those targeted for such scrutiny no longer have security clearances anyway. Would someone explain to Trump the Petulant that you can’t strip a security clearance that does not exist?

This appalling ignorance of history, law, and policy, and the consistent refusal to listen to advisers, certainly the refusal to accept the value of truth spoken to power, all appear to have played a role in driving Clapper, who is on Trump’s list, to construct his memoir and share his fears of the direction in which current events are leading the nation. There is a moment when respect for the office of the presidency is overshadowed by concerns about the abuse of power, as was the case under Richard Nixon. But this week’s events are beginning to suggest that even Watergate may not stand as the worst abuse of presidential power in American history. We cannot be afraid to say so. Clapper, who has made the round of news shows in recent months, states frankly near the end of his book:

I don’t believe our democracy can function for long on lies, particularly when inconvenient and difficult facts spoken by the practitioners of truth are dismissed as “fake news.” I know that the Intelligence Community cannot serve our nation if facts are negotiable. Just in the past few years, I’ve seen our country become polarized because people live in separate realities in which everyone has his or her own set of facts—some of which are lies knowingly distributed by a foreign adversary. This was not something I could idly stand by and watch happen to the country I love.

And so, he quotes General George Patton about how to move forward:

                “The time to take counsel of your fears is before you make an important battle decision. That’s the time to listen to every fear you can imagine. When you have collected all the facts and fears and made your decision, turn off all your fears and go ahead.”

And hence the book’s title. It is an intelligent choice. Like Clapper with the presidents and superior officers he served in a five-decade career, I could probably question or object to some points he makes, but his larger points are impeccable. They are about honor and truth and service and honesty. Either you believe these ideals exist and matter, or you don’t. America must decide.

Jim Schwab

We Must Be Gandalf

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It is a dramatic and evocative scene. In The Two Towers, the second novel of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, Grima Wormtongue, a spy at the service of the evil wizard Saruman, has gained control of the mind of Théoden, the king of Rohan, which is on the verge of being attacked by the Orcs, Saruman’s army of vicious creatures. Just in time, Gandalf, the wizard who is aiding the hobbit Frodo in his quest to destroy the Ring, succeeds in freeing Théoden from the influence of Wormtongue, at which point he rallies his beleaguered people to relocate to Helm’s Deep to defend them from the oncoming attack.

The Lord of the Rings is, of course, a fantasy, but a literarily sophisticated one that mirrors many classic human moral and political dilemmas. Tolkien might never have anticipated anything like the current relationship between Donald Trump and VladimirPutin, but he clearly understood how an aggressive enemy would seek to weaken its opponent from within by kneecapping its leadership. The Monday press conference in Helsinki of the Russian and U.S. presidents is as close an analogy in real life to the Rohan crisis as one can imagine.

Clearly, Trump’s pitiful performance has earned opprobrium from both Democrats and Republicans, though many of the latter are still cowering in the shadows and reluctant to speak out. The mere idea that a U.S. president would defend a Russian dictator while casting aspersions on the findings of his own intelligence agencies concerning a well-documented effort by Russia to subvert American elections would have been the stuff of wild fiction just a few years ago. Today, Trump is not only under the spell of the evil KGB wizard but is apparently a willing apologist, if not an accomplice. Robert Mueller is a skillful investigator but not a wizard. There is no Gandalf to free Trump from Putin’s influence, and he will not be rallying his people to defend our nation against further sabotage. Donald Trump is clearly more interested in defending what he perceives as his legitimacy in the presidency than in defending the interests of his nation. Call that what you will, but it is our current state of affairs.

Those still deluded enough to give Russian President Putin the benefit of the doubt could benefit, if they still have an open mind, from reading “Nyet” (Know Thine Enemy), a chapter of John McCain’s recent book, The Restless Wave, in which he delineates his two decades of experience with Putin and his dismal record of aggression and human rights violations. His 40 pages of documentation are probably more than enough for the average voter, but those willing to probe further could also benefit from Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen’s incisive exposé, The Man without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. Want more proof? Try Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev, an eerie tour of the surreal world of news production inside Putin’s Russia. There is more, but those books should constitute adequate persuasion. Putin is anything but a benign force in the world.

Like everyone else following the news, I am well aware of Trump’s lame attempt on Tuesday to walk back some of what he said, once he was safe in the White House again and not standing alongside Putin in Helsinki. He claimed he meant “wouldn’t” when he said he didn’t see “why it would be” Russia that had interfered in our 2016 election. Frankly, it reminds me of a skit from the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1968 that I have never forgotten. Comedian Pat Paulsen played the part of a candidate for the presidency, and Tom and Dick asked him about something he had said. He claimed he never said any such thing, so they rolled the videotape, which showed him saying verbatim exactly what they had just alleged. Paulsen’s curt but absurdly comic reaction: “I was misquoted.” It makes me wonder how the brothers and Paulsen captured the essence of Trump 50 years before his time. Some people are just prescient, I guess.

The situation affords two paths to American redemption, regardless of all the silly hearings Republican-led congressional committees may stage to divert our attention to hapless individuals like Peter Strzok, who had the misfortune of being exposed for the unwise use of his FBI phone to exchange political messages with his lover. The idea that this tempest in a teapot represents some vast conspiracy of bias in federal law enforcement is ludicrous. Congress should be spending its time on real issues, including Russian interference in U.S. elections, but Republican committee chairs would rather waste their credibility to protect Trump from further scrutiny.

So, what are those two paths? One is clearly legal and involves the ongoing, probing, extremely professional work of Mueller and his team of investigators, who have already brought dozens of indictments and several guilty pleas, as well as jail for Paul Manafort when it became clear to a judge that he was attempting to influence potential witnesses. That will move forward unless Trump proves rash enough to attempt to fire him. So far, that has been a bridge too far.

The other path is political and involves democracy at its best. Even long-time conservative George Will, referring to Trump as “this sad, embarrassing wreck of a man,” is now urging voters to put Democrats in charge of Congress in the November election. Will has not changed parties. Instead, he feels Republicans need a thorough electoral thrashing at the hands of voters in order to come to their senses. Democratic takeover of the U.S. House would mean a complete shift in committee leadership, with hearings on critical issues taking on real meaning, leaving the President with nowhere to hide. Voter activism need not be limited to voting, however. Rallies in the streets, knocking on doors, letters to the editor, and all the other tools of advocacy are available to the patriots who care about their country and are willing to demand better leadership.

This nation remains a democracy despite Trump’s dubious intentions. We have met Gandalf, and he is us. Gandalf in our dilemma is the collective power of our democratic resistance and our votes. It is up to us to protect our republic from the influence of Putin and his cyber-agents.

Jim Schwab