National leaders dealing with national emergencies often have places where they can “get away from it all.” Britain’s wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, had a secret subterranean complex located in London. From this nerve center, he directed his country’s war effort. Much of the complex is now a museum.

His German counterpart, the unlamented Adolph Hitler, had several getaways. Among the more notable is the Kehlsteinhaus (Eagle’s Nest) located high in the Bavarian Alps overlooking Berchtesgaden. The surviving portions of Martin Borman’s gift to Herr Hitler are now part of a restaurant.

The war on the eastern front was largely directed from the Wolfschanze (Wolf’s Lair) located in a forest in what is now Poland. Blown up by retreating German forces in 1945, and further demolished by Russian forces, the Wolfschanze is today a moss-covered collection of massive concrete structures slowly being overtaken by the surrounding forest, although there is talk of turning the site into a tourist attraction.

The final getaway was the Fuhrerbunker, located near the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. From this underground command center, an increasingly delusional Hitler issued desperate orders to non-existing military forces in a doomed attempt to stave off Soviet forces encircling the capital of the “Thousand Year Reich.” It was here that most historians believe Hitler took his own life.

It is fitting that this final getaway of the most hated regime in human history is now the site of something as prosaic as a parking lot.

The United States has had, and still has, its own hideaways. The most famous of the known locations is a Cold War-era subterranean complex located under the Greenbrier resort hotel in the West Virginia mountains near White Sulphur Springs. Hardened against nuclear attack, the Greenbrier facility was designed to house up to one thousand people, among whom would be the members of the United States Congress. They could be there for an extended period, and from there, the United States government would continue to function in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. Dirt from the excavation reportedly was used to build a golf course and facilitate construction of an airport runway.  It was decommissioned in 1992 and is now open for public and private “Bunker Tours” most days of the year.

All of these “command and control” facilities reflect the gravity of the national emergencies that caused them to be built.

Last week, in the White House Rose Garden, our president declared his very own national emergency, apparently to free up cash that, for over two years, the Congress had previously balked at giving him, in order to build a barrier of some variety on the southern border with Mexico. Of course, the original promise, made during the 2016 presidential campaign, was that the wall would be paid for by Mexico – not by American taxpayers from funds filched from other previously approved and appropriated government projects, projects that reportedly included a middle school in Kentucky.

As national emergencies go, the immediacy and degree of the threat seemed diminished when our president said he really didn’t have to declare a national emergency at all but did so to move his wall project along faster – to be done in time for the 2020 presidential campaign.

Having exercised what, in his own mind, he believes he has the power to do, our president scurried off to his own favorite place to get away from it all. Not for him the moldy damp walls of subterranean bastions or the isolation of mountaintop aeries. He was off to his favorite golf resort, Mar-a-Lago.

When you consider the gravity of the circumstances that compelled national leaders, both heroes and villains, to go to extraordinary lengths to help manage their respective national emergencies, a national emergency that the president believes can by managed from a golf course causes one to suspect the national emergency is not much of a national emergency after all.

And probably never should have been labelled as one in the first place.

Not that anyone will have noticed, but I haven’t had much to say recently. Truth be told, middle daughter gave her technologically challenged dad one of those gizmos that turns your television into a “smart” TV. As a result, I have been binge-watching old series that I never watched when they first ran years ago.

I admit, not a very productive use of time, but it is good to know that Alfred and Uhtred saved Wessex from the Danes, and that there are enough Star Trek offshoots out there to save us from any number of predator species wandering through this, or any other, galaxy.

I have not become a total recluse, but whenever I poke my nose out to sniff the prevailing political winds, nothing much seems to have changed.

Our president remains true to form, and that form still seems at times to border (no pun intended) on the grotesque. In a recent example, where was the percentage in holding government workers’ paychecks hostage in an attempt to force funding for a wall, fence, barrier, or whatever it is called in the moment, when the president failed to get that same funding during the two years his political party controlled the House and Senate, as well as the property at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

And as sure as God made little green apples, his loyalists remain true.

To be honest, from time to time I find myself more than a little envious of the Trump faithful. It must be a comfort to see everything in black and white and have a president ready to instruct the faithful as to which is which—whether it is or is not. It avoids the inconvenient discomfort and uncertainty of attempting to acquire, process, and act upon information as an individual.  Many of the Trump faithful seem to need nothing more than a robust round of chanting “Stand fast, Mr. President” to substitute for any semblance of critical thinking.

And then there is the Congress. On one side of the aisle, there are too many members, fearing a primary challenge, who are unwilling to do the job to which they were elected – as if their own individual political fate is more important than the fate of the country, they took an oath to serve and defend. On the other side, there is a hyper-energetic class of freshmen legislators who seem to lack the patience required to learn to walk before they begin the sprint towards 2020, running the risk of falling flat on their faces, which, given their collective potential, would be a national tragedy.

And 2020 looms over everything.

If our president wants re-nomination, in a monochromatic party dominated by his faithful and representing an ever-shrinking slice of the electorate, he has it.

As for the Democrats, they see a weakened president ripe to be beaten. Because of his perceived vulnerability, there is no shortage of Democrat challengers. They should bear some things in mind.

First, the president is not as weak as some Democrats think he is. He retains the absolute loyalty of at least one-third (and probably a little more) of the electorate. Democrat candidates would kill to have that many votes in the bank before the campaign even begins.

Second, speaking of killing, as the multitude of Democrat candidates elbow and gouge out each other’s eyes in order to gain advantage, or resort to political correctness run amuck, the real possibility exists that the survivor may enter the fall campaign as damaged goods. Challenge each other’s ideas but avoid gratuitous swipes at each other’s character. Ronald Reagan got that one right.

Third, there is yet another billionaire businessman out there making noises about an independent run for the presidency. Don’t ignore him. The political legacy of George Wallace, Ross Perot, John Anderson, Jill Stein, and Ralph Nader could repeat itself—in spades.

Finally, according to the nation’s professional investigators of crime, the evidence is conclusive that there was foreign involvement aimed at influencing the outcome of the 2016 election. Being forewarned should encourage being forearmed. Spend what it takes to beef up security. Reportedly, members of the Obama Administration had information about foreign involvement but said little to avoid charges of trying to influence the race themselves. That was a mistake that should only be made once. As the current wisdom goes, “if you see something, say something.”

And as for myself, I’ll be around, but while I’m a bit embarrassed to admit to it, I am really getting into “Poldark.”

Hanging on the wall outside the office of one of the mayors for whom I worked was a framed inspirational poem written by Robert Fulghum entitled “Everything I really need to know I learned in kindergarten.” What followed was a list of aphorisms such as “Play Fair,” “CLEAN UP YOUR OWN MESS,” and, perhaps most importantly, “Say you’re SORRY when you HURT somebody.” (Mr. Fulghum’s emphasis.)

There are darker truisms learned in kindergarten missing from the list, such as that, in almost any group, there are bullies who don’t play fair, who are unwilling to clean up their own messes, and, perhaps most importantly, are unwilling to ever say they’re sorry when they hurt someone.

We learned in kindergarten that when you give in to a bully’s demands, you don’t stop the demands. You only encourage the next one as the bully figures out their bullying tactics can help them have their way.

We learned, perhaps reluctantly, that among the ways to handle a bully is to confront them by simply saying, “No. Your conduct is unacceptable and I’m not going to cave in to your demands.”

Such confrontation is rarely easy. It is stressful. It can be painful. It can hurt innocent people caught in the crossfire.

But sometimes is becomes necessary.

If only to discourage the next time.

Which brings us to our president, and to our president’s wall on the southern border.

It would be one thing if there was assurance that the president sincerely believes that a physical barrier is necessary to border security. That is certainly what he says, but has this transactional president given any reason to conclude that he sincerely believes in anything beyond his own personal welfare?

The “call for the wall” began as a line used in campaign rallies, perhaps originally inserted into his remarks by aides to remind him to do a riff on his views on immigration. The line got a raucous response from his base, and it evolved into a campaign promise that the president now feels must be kept, or risk losing that same base.

Had the presidential candidate gotten a similar reaction talking about building a lighter-than-air Zeppelin built out of concrete and rebar and paid for by Lichtenstein, we could easily be talking about concrete airships for which Lichtenstein refused to pay rather than concrete, or see-through steel walls.

There is no disagreement about the need for border security. There can be debate over which measures are necessary, and a physical wall is part of that discussion. Arguments can be made for it. An aggressive defense appeared few weeks ago on this page. Despite reservations about the xenophobic undertones of that piece, it was not without its points.

Not surprisingly, our president made the conscious decision not to engage in debate. Rather than play the role of national leader, he chose to play the role of national bully.

Using the powers of his office, he purposely manufactured a crisis, for which he said he would take responsibility, shutting down one fourth of the government and holding eight hundred thousand federal workers and their paychecks hostage until his ultimatum resulted in a wall – on his terms and none other.

Beyond those workers directly affected, the ripple of effects of their loss of income is just beginning to be felt.

There is no reason for this pain other than to provide leverage to force compliance with his autocratic wishes.

These are the tactics of a bully, and as previously noted, giving in to a bully only encourages repetition of similar tactics down the road over some other hissy-fit yet unforeseen.

The president has painted himself into a corner, but he is the artist of his own predicament. No one is required, or even able, to save him from himself.

Mr. President, it is time to climb down from your bully pulpit and play fair with those unpaid federal workers, and with the American people. It is time to clean up your own mess, and most importantly, it is time to say you’re sorry to every American hurt by your actions.

These are lessons that should have been learned in kindergarten.

Let’s be partisan for a change.

(Okay, so maybe that’s not a change. Whatever.)

As this is written on Christmas Day minus three, we are in yet another government shutdown, the third in 2018. This time the shutdown involves about one-quarter of federal government departments and affects roughly 800,000 government workers who are either furloughed without pay or will be working without pay, although the latter will be paid retroactively. So, if the TSA gal ordering you to “empty the pockets, get out of the shoes, and lose the belt” seems a bit out of sorts, you might cut her some slack.

The immediate cause of the shutdown was a breakdown in negotiations between our president and bipartisan congressional leadership over a five-billion-dollar item to help fund the Trump Wall.

It was a typical Trumpian negotiation, highlighted with the Pelosi-Schumer “chat” on Christmas Day minus 14. To paraphrase, “Give me my five billion dollars or I will proudly shut down the government in the name of border security. … I will take the mantle of shutting down the government and I will not blame you.” (Emphasis mine.)

To most rational observers, this might look more like an ultimatum than negotiations, but then again, we are in Trump world.

Republican and Democrat leadership had put together a proposal for a continuing resolution that would fund the government until February. The resolution included $1.6 billion dollars for “border security,” which could include work on the president’s pet project. The idea was that a shutdown could be averted, and there would be time to work on a more permanent fix, again.

Our president indicated he would sign off on the resolution. With this assurance, congressional leadership breathed a collective sigh of relief and trotted back to their respective caucuses with their piece of paper celebrating “peace in our time.” The Senate even passed it.

Then a funny thing happened on the way to the signing.

On Christmas Day minus five, the president’s right-wing radio and TV talk show hosts turned on him. It was not pretty. The word “wimp” was used. The leader of the free world, arguably the most powerful man on the planet, felt the need to place a personal call to one of the dissident radio personalities to assure him that the president had changed his mind and would not be signing off on the continuing resolution.

And in so doing, left the congressional delegation, Republicans and Democrats alike, with their shirt tails hanging out and their fannies in the air.

Oh, and on Christmas Day minus four, the president blamed the Democrats for the impending shutdown.

So much for building trust.

Now for the partisan bit …

Why, in the name of all that’s holy, would Democrats help the president fulfill even part of a campaign promise that he would then use to beat them about the head and shoulders in 2020?

It would be one thing if the campaign promise, if fulfilled, would be of benefit to ordinary Americans. This is not the case.

The “wall” is nothing more than a line tossed out in an early Trump rally that unexpectedly caught the imagination of the base, a base that Trump feels he must placate at all cost.

A wall didn’t work for the Chinese. It didn’t work for the Romans. It didn’t work for the East Germans. It won’t work for us. It’s old technology that is little more than a boondoggle waiting to happen. Be it concrete, pointy metal slats, or a white picket model harking back the halcyon days of the ’50s, a static wall is no match for increased border patrols, cameras, electronic detection equipment, and drones hovering overhead.

So, the sides are at loggerheads. Each side is determined not to appear to have caved in to the demands of the other.

Which isn’t to say there isn’t a deal to be made.

When will someone think to dust off and update the Dream Act, originally introduced in 2001 with no less a luminary than Orrin Hatch as a co-sponsor, or the related Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007?

Both pieces of legislation are near and dear to Democratic hearts and have had some GOP support in the past. As a bonus, the Reform Act provided for major increases in funding for border enforcement, and, yes, Democrats might be willing to bend on the wall, or whatever, if, in return, they get legislation that resolves the status of over 12 million mostly tax-paying undocumented immigrants.

It’s called negotiation, and it works better than what we have now.

By the time you read this, it may be Christmas Day plus some. On to 2019. Happy New Year!

Let’s face it, the body politic has its internal differences.

Some of us believe that our president is a serial liar and that this character trait should be an automatic disqualifier for holding the office.

Some of us believe it is much more important to look at what the president does, not just what he says.

Some of us believe our president is a bully riding rough shod over all accepted norms of ordinary decency.

Some of us believe our president is a victim, hounded daily by a liberal fake news cabal unwilling to come to terms with the results of the 2016 presidential election.

Some of us believe facts are real occurrences, demonstrated to exist, or known to have existed in the past.

Some of us believe what we believe to be facts are facts, or, at a minimum, constitute an alternate set of facts.

Some of us believe our president is attacking the institutions that underpin our republic.

Some of us believe the president was elected to shake up the status quo, of which these institutions are a part – and, thus, are fair game.

Some of us believe our national economy is part of a global economy, with all national economies being interdependent with each other.

Some of us believe our economy, being the largest and strongest in the world, gives us the right to go our own way with all other national economies following our lead, or suffering the consequences of being outside the orbit of our world view.

Some of us believe the president is a diplomatic embarrassment on the world stage.

Some of us believe its about time we have a president who speaks plainly, bluntly, and forcefully to world leaders without the mealy mouthed, overly polite double-speak of international diplomacy.

Some of us believe we are abdicating our role as leader of the free world in favor of a more isolationist posture.

Some of us believe it’s time the so-called “free world” took more responsibility for it own well being because nothing is “free” and we are tired of forever picking up the tab for others.

And, so it goes.

Despite all our differences, we may well have one thing in common.

If two reports coming out of the Senate recently are to be believed, all of us, of all ideological persuasions, have been sucker-punched by a foreign country weaponizing our own social media to interfere and influence our domestic politics.

It is one thing for Americans to fight among themselves for ascendency in determining the direction of the republic.

This is called democracy.

It can be nasty. It can be dirty. It can even be divisive.

But it should be an intramural contest.

Outsiders are not invited.

Nor should they be tolerated.

It should be a non-partisan issue to get to the bottom of foreign involvement in our electoral process.

This should not be interpreted as a disguised attack on the current administration.

The election of 2016 is over.

What happened in that election appears to have been intended to benefit our current president and harm his opponent. But, heck, if you disliked Hillary Clinton, you would have to stand in a rather long line.

I am much more concerned about the future, and Trump Nation should be equally concerned, because next time it could be a Democrat nominee who stands to benefit from such foreign involvement.

A good place to start is with the Facebooks, Googles, YouTubes, reedits, Instagrams, Twitters, SnapChats, and Spotifies of the world.

To quote Luke 12:48 (NKJV), “From whom much is given, much is required.”

Much is given to these, and other similar, platforms. The benefit is called “profit” and there is enough of it to go around – in spades.

And as to the requirements …

Please don’t tell me that “Aw shucks, we had no idea…”

If you can direct advertising to me that I just looked up “funny underwear” (because I just did), you can tell me that the Internet Research Agency, based in St. Petersburg, Russian Federation, or some other off shore entity, is the source of the information you are peddling.

I’m not even asking that you censor such content. Frankly, I don’t trust you to edit what content I can access. Just give me the information I need to make an informed decision as to how much credence I give to the post.

It isn’t too much to ask.

But it should be the least of what should be demanded in the interest of the continuing health of the republic.

Before he became the face on the 10-dollar bill, not to mention the subject of a runaway hit Broadway musical, Alexander Hamilton was a principal architect of, and apologist for, the United States Constitution.

Hamilton argued in favor of a strong national government. He was not a pointy-headed liberal. Were he alive today, he would probably be found among the orphaned ranks of what used to be the fiscally conservative wing of what used to be the Republican party.

In his Objections and Answers Respecting the Administration, published in August 1792, Hamilton argued on behalf of the inherent strength of a republican (“little ‘r’”) form of government over, say, a monarchy – monarchy being the prevalent governmental form of the era.

The essential question was this: Could a republic, dependent upon the support and participation of its citizens, survive in the long run? While Hamilton argued it could (and would), he had to admit that republicanism had an Achilles heel that had to do with the character of the republic’s leader:

“The truth unquestionably is, the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion …

“When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents…despotic in his ordinary demeanor—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government and bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the nonsense of the zealots of the day—it may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”

Far be it from me, living as I do in the middle of Trump country, to ascribe the characteristics cataloged by Hamilton to any current politician on the national stage.

On the other hand, if the shoe fits …

The republican form of government finds its legitimacy in the power of the people, acting through their elected representatives, to direct their own affairs. Hamilton’s fear was the rise of the demagogue who consciously, and intentionally, takes advantage of his position and talents to appeal to the dark underbelly of the body politic, to divide, to confuse, to inflame passions, to sew doubt and suspicion about the institutions of government itself,  all in the cause of satisfying the needs of his own ego and welfare first, with the needs and welfare of the country – and its people – being secondary considerations.

Hamilton feared the power of a demagogue to subvert the power of the people, and therefore the nation itself, and highjack both to further the demagogue’s own ends.

Such subversion does not happen overnight. It takes time to dismantle, or render irrelevant, well over 200 years of generally accepted norms and traditions that have put meat on the bones of Mr. Hamilton’s Constitution.

It happens one manufactured crisis at a time, each building upon the other, and all collectively designed to ultimately make the Constitution itself irrelevant in favor of the “gut feelings” of the great leader who claims to know better.

The scenario scared the dickens out of Alexander Hamilton.

And I don’t feel so good about it myself.

Our president recently said that he was “totally willing” to shut down the federal government if Congress doesn’t pony up $5 billion for his wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. House Majority Whip Steve Scalese (R-La.) jumped on the Trump Train when he wondered out loud if “Democrats are going to shut down the government because they don’t want to keep Americans safe.”

Give me a break. We have been subjected to this shopworn tirade for almost two years now and it’s getting tiresome.

There is no way to avoid the racism inherent in a policy intended to shut. off the flow of brown people into this country. Whoa, responds the MAGA Multitude, skin color has nothing to do with it. It’s all about security. A country that can’t control its borders is no country at all. Fair point, and it would be an even fairer point if the anti-immigrant hysteria was directed solely at people entering the country illegally. The facts indicate otherwise. Equal attention is being paid to making it more difficult to enter the country legally, which makes illegal entry a last alternative to asylum seekers desperate to escape the violence and economic ruin endemic in their countries of origin.

First a crisis is fabricated, then political gain can be made by exploiting it.

Except it isn’t working out that way.

There is a reason why House Majority Whip Scalese will likely become House Minority Whip Scalese come January. That reason is a mid-term election that saw 8.7 million more Americans vote against the president and his minions’ inflammatory rhetoric than were seduced by it. This resulted in a 40-seat net gain for the opposition party and a changing of the guard in the House of Representatives.

If your dog won’t hunt, maybe it’s time to find another dog.

This is, of course, unlikely to happen anytime soon because the threat being peddled plays well with the MAGA base.

Myself, I have problems seeing shoeless kids in diapers as being the equivalent of Visigoths pounding on the gates of Rome, but then again, I’ve pretty much given up on trying to understand the macho-saturated mental progressions of the Trumpian echo chamber.

What our history demonstrates is that every wave of immigration, from religious dissenters of the 17^th century, to the Scots-Irish, to the Scandinavians, to the Germans, to the Italians, to those of Asian heritage, to those hailing from the Balkans and eastern Europe, each have, in their turn, had to face nativist suspicion and opposition.

And each, within a generation or so, have served to enrich the society of their adopted country many times over the temporary inconveniences associated with their cultural assimilation.

You would think after a couple of hundred years we would get the message.

Do we need secure borders and immigrants entering our country legally? Of course.

Might I suggest that instead of dispatching thousands of American soldiers to the border to string concertina wire and cook turkey dinners for each other, it might make more sense to dispatch a few hundred additional magistrates to that same border to process asylum claims in a more expeditious manner.

For those who meet our requirements, welcome aboard, and where should we send your tax forms?

For those who do not, we do have the right to determine who comes into our country, as harsh as that may seem to some.

And, oh yeah, about Mexico paying for that big beautiful wall…

Promises made, promises swept.

As in, under the rug.

I’ve had a couple of folks mention that they hadn’t seen anything from me on this page for some time. It is unclear whether they were disappointed about a lack of new commentary or were disappointed to find me still in the land of the living.

I prefer to believe the former, but in all honesty, I can’t dismiss the latter either.

I have had my reasons.

In the three weeks leading up to the mid-terms, when you would expect me to be in my most extreme fair-and-unbiased-yet-hair-on-fire mode, I must admit to being AWOL, as in “out of the country.”

Although it meant missing three weeks of negative advertisements full of lies, white lies and damn lies, the missus and I were in Scotland reconnecting with my extended family.

The cousins take a lively interest in the goings on in the former colonies. What were the take-aways? They are absolutely baffled by a gun culture that sees more guns in circulation than there are people to own them. When you begin to explain the patchwork nature of our health care system, their shock and disbelief is palpable.

And what about our president?

They are very polite. After all, in his declining years, King George III (of “Hamilton” fame) spoke earnestly to trees, so they don’t feel they are in any position to be trashing the eccentricities of our current leader. They do indicate, however, that talking to trees was less dangerous to western civilization in its day than, say, courting Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un is today.

Which is not to say our president doesn’t have his supporters. On Islay (Eye-la) our taxi driver commented favorably that President Trump does what he says he is going to do. Islay is one of those islands surrounded by water that the president occasionally references—but this island has eight active single malt whisky (that is the correct spelling) distilleries scattered about. Yippee!! And thanks be to the taxi driver who delivered me to nearly all of them. At the end of the day, as near as I can remember, who cared about his politics?

Bottom line, a great trip, and I didn’t miss those negative ads at all.

I have also been processing the results of the election.

I continue to be amazed by how steadfastly red this county and state continue to be. If my Republican friends and neighbors nominated a turkey to run for office, the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of the turkey being elected in the fall.

Come to think of it, this is not a hypothetical. It has already happened on more than one occasion.

Nationally, I believe it is a healthy development that the House has flipped to Democrat. I believe in checks and balances. In its slavish subservience to the president, be it from fear of being “primaried” or outright political cowardness, the present House, which could have provided a counterpoint to the executive branch even with a Republican majority, failed in its constitutional duty. The Republican caucus deserved what it got.

Having said that, I am aware that Democrats are fully capable of screwing up a two-car parade.

There is a temptation to spend the next two years replicating the Republican penchant for unending exercises in politically motivated oversight hearings.

Certainly, there are matters that require scrutiny to see if legislation is required to prevent a repetition of political chicanery, or to protect our governmental and non-governmental institutions that have been under more or less constant attack since January 20, 2016.

Having said that, I don’t think Democrats seized a House majority merely to bedevil the president. They were elected because the public is fed up with a gridlocked do-nothing Congress.

Unless they wish their current ascendency to be of short duration, it is up to the new Democrat House to pursue the priorities supported by the public who elected them, items such as health care, infrastructure repair, immigration reform, prescription drug costs, gerrymandering, restoration of the Voting Rights Act, and reform of an electoral process awash in dark money.

We’ll see.

Finally, I note the passing of my friend George Hopkins. In politics, we rarely agreed, but the good judge was always a gentleman who was willing to discuss rationally and never resorted to a rant. I will miss him.

To date, as a writer-of-columns, I have given Senate Republicans and our president a pass on the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court appointment. I thought there was enough noise out there without adding to it.

Privately, however, I thought it a bit strange that the nominee was not on the list of potential candidates for elevation to the court thoughtfully provided to our leader by the ultra-conservative Federalist Society. It began to make more sense when some of Mr. Kavanaugh’s interesting past pronouncements became public, as in the president of the United States is, for all practical purposes, above the law, at least while he (or she) is in office.

A justice on the court holding such views would, I am sure, be a source of comfort to a president who may have to make such an argument before the court in the maybe-not-so-distant future if he is to save his presidency. Far be it from me, however, to suggest that such a self-serving consideration played into the nomination decision.

I was not overly surprised when the Republican Senate Caucus made it clear they intended to put the nomination on a fast track and ram it through the Senate, hopefully with an “aye” vote from a blue senator or two from red states to give the process a fig leaf of bipartisanship, but on a straight party line vote if necessary. Such unseemly haste on a lifetime appointment is not what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they talked about “advise and consent”, but if Mitch McConnell, Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, Lindsay Graham, and their Republican fellow travelers are willing to try to explain themselves to the men-in-wigs when they reach the hereafter, so be it.

As Republican leadership is so prone to point out, elections have consequences. I take solace in the fact that if a future Democrat-controlled Senate blocks a Supreme Court nomination by a future Republican president for, oh, let’s say, nine or 10 months, in order to deny that president the appointment he (or she) is constitutionally entitled to make, I know the Republican minority will honor their basic principle that those in power get to do whatever they want, because they can.

And, yes, that unidentified flying object that just flitted across your imagination was, in fact, a pig flying.

Rather than rehash all that proceeded the final confirmation vote, what do we have in a newly minted Justice Kavanaugh?

At a minimum, we are adding another reliable vote to “originalist/textualist” wing of the court, which increases that faction to five members, which all but guarantees a working majority on all cases coming before the court.

At worse, we are injecting the virus of hyper-partisanship into a court that has already shown itself susceptible to political ideology trumping legal precedent when such is necessary to reach an ideologically preferred result.

If anything, the court is beginning to bear an uncanny resemblance to the court during the “Gilded Age” of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. That was a Supreme Court which raised, to a fine art, using “protection of individual rights” of the powerful to enable the powerful to deny the individual rights of the less powerful beneath them. It was a court that used “states’ rights” as a rationale for preventing federal intervention into cases of state-sponsored abuse of the rights of their citizens. It was a court which slavishly catered to the interests of the plutocrats of the time no matter how grotesque the legal sophistry required to support the result. The results? Jim Crow laws, voter suppression, legally tolerated lynching, and the striking down of minimum wage laws, zoning laws, and child labor laws, to name a few.

It was an era many thought to be in the distant past. With the addition of Justice Kavanaugh to the existing “originalist/textualist” wing, however, the past may only be prologue to the future.

In which case, Justice Kavanaugh may be very comfortable in his new robes.

As for the rest of us, maybe not so much.

The best thing that could happen to Donald Trump is a Democrat-controlled House of Representatives after the 2018 mid-term elections.

Before the nice men in the white coats, armed with straitjackets, are dispatched to my front door, let me explain.

Even the most loyal of our president’s supporters must admit, if only in the darkest recesses of their minds, that from time to time (as in most of the time) The Donald can be somewhat, shall we say, impulsive? He takes pride in proclaiming that his decisions are often driven by his gut instincts—even though those decisions can sometimes lead to gut-wrenching results.

However questionable some decisions appear to be, they are not necessarily fatal to the republic because the guys in the powdered wigs and white stockings who came up with the Constitution foresaw the possibility of someone with delusions of grandeur or authoritarian tendencies coming to power.

James Madison, often called the “Father of the Constitution,” once said, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” What he meant was that the Constitution did not expect the people, or their officeholders, to be always virtuous and respectful of one another, it expected them to often pursue their own self-interests. Consequently, the framers took steps to minimize the damage if someone in a position of power, such as a president, acted in their own interests, or impulsively, and not in the interest of the public-at-large.

The control mechanism built into the system is called the “separation of powers,” the idea that there are three branches of government, and each can block the actions of the other two.

Short of enacting or refusing to enact legislation, the Congress, as a co-equal branch of government, was, and is, intended to fulfill another role, that of sounding board – or brake – to react to presidential initiatives.

If presidential action raises questions of legality or advisability, it is the constitutional duty of members of Congress to speak out, initiate debate, and not act as mere rubber stamps.

This part of the constitutional construct is not working. A sizeable majority of the Republican caucuses in both chambers appears to be more concerned with their own re-election chances than they are with their constitutional responsibilities. Afraid of being “primaried” by Trump loyalists, they sit mute, refusing to provide any restraint to the actions of a president who has yet to demonstrate he has any self-restraint at all.

Not only is this abdication of responsibility not good for the country, ironically it is not good for the president. Without any congressional restraint evident, and left to his own devices, while the president thrills the roughly one-third of the electorate who support him, he digs himself into an even deeper hole with the two-thirds who have serious reservations.

You would think that someone might mention to him that having two-thirds of the country against you is not conducive to being re-elected. (On second thought, mum’s the word.

Now, about that Democrat-controlled House…

Rest assured, there would be a whole lot of oversight. But perhaps that oversight might well save the president from some of his more impulsive forays into national policies, policies of which he has only a rudimentary understanding.

It may seem strange to have a Democrat-majority House save Donald Trump from himself, but even though it would be a dirty job, for the sake of the republic, someone must do it. His fellow Republicans certainly have not.

The response: But he would get impeached!!

Maybe, maybe not. While there would be enough Democrat votes to impeach in the House, there are unlikely to be enough votes in the Senate to convict. Why embark on a course of action that is doomed to ultimate failure?  Why risk making an unbridled president a more sympathetic figure, and further motivate his base? Will Democrats so soon forget how they benefitted from the backlash that occurred after the botched impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton? The better course of action may be to prevent anything catastrophic from getting through the Congress – and calling that a victory.

Another: But nothing would get done!

Folks, with the factional infighting within the Republican caucuses, nothing much is getting done now. If a Democrat majority in the House was short-sighted enough to be blatantly obstructionist, it will have gifted the next crop of GOP candidates with the issue of a do-nothing Congress. And that’s an issue currently owned by Republicans, and currently being exploited successfully by Democrat challengers.

And another: But it just sounds crazy!

As if political craziness has been an alien concept over the last 18 months or so? Or even before that if you take into account Mitch McConnell’s partisan high jacking of President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland!

I know it sounds strange to theorize that Democrats should come to the fore to save the president from himself, but after all, the fate of the republic is more important than the fate of the man.

Anything to be of help.