By RANDY SOUDERS

During the years I served as Chairman of the Board for Jean Kennedy Smith’s Arts and Disability program, Very Special Arts (VSA at the Kennedy Center), I had there opportunity to meet a wide range of remarkable and courageous disabled Americans. Among the lasting friendships is a painter and visual artist, Randy Souders, who was rendered quadriplegic at the age of 17 in a 1972 accident. His concerns of late have been heightened by Trump and MAGA Republicans. I share his communication with his permission here in the hope that tech designers and others will be alert to the fact that great care is required at this point, lest history repeat. — Mike Magee MD

When I was injured at the age of 17 the world was still quite closed for people like me. That was a year before passage of HR 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. As I recall that law was the first to mandate access to public places that received federal funds. A year later Jean Kennedy Smith founded VSA (Very Special Arts) which has provided important arts opportunities to literally millions of people with disabilities around the globe. It was a very different world back then and artistic achievement was an important way people such as myself could prove their worth to a society that still saw little evidence of it.

It’s unbelievable to think there are serious threats to roll back many of those hard won gains in the name of deregulation and profitability. Disability is costly and people with disabilities are still woefully underemployed. So when a billionaire presidential candidate repeatedly mocks people with disabilities, how long till the “useless/ unworthy” excuses rise again? The old term describing a person with a disability as an “invalid” has another meaning. The adjective use is defined as “Not valid; not true, correct, acceptable or appropriate.”

Few today are aware that the first victims of the Holocaust were the mentally, physically and neurologically disabled people. They were systematically murdered by several Nazi programs specifically targeting them. The Nazi regime was aided in their crimes by perverted “medical doctors and other experts” who were often seen wearing white lab coats in order to visually reinforce their propaganda.

Branded as “useless eaters” and existing as “lives not worthy of life,” people with disabilities were declared an unbearable burden both to German society and the state. As Holocaust historians have documented, “From 1939 to 1941 the Nazis carried out a campaign of euthanasia known as the T4 program (an abbreviation of Tiergartenstrasse 4 which itself was a shortened version of Zentral Dienststelle-T4: Central Office T4) the address from which the program was coordinated.”

These most vulnerable of humans were reportedly the first victims of mass extermination by poison gas and cheaper CO2 from automobile exhaust fumes. But first “a panel of medical experts were required to give their approval for the euthanasia/ ‘mercy-killing’ of each person.”

In the end an estimated quarter million people with disabilities were killed in gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. This model for killing disabled people was later applied to the industrialized murder within Nazi concentration and death camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau.”

Much has been written on this topic but few seem to know the chronology and diabolical history of how these “beneficial cleansings” of undesirables often start. The Nazi’s enlisted medical doctors to provide them with a veneer of moral justification for their atrocities.

Throughout history, authoritarian political despots have also worked diligently to silence dissent and co-opt religion in order to assist in their mutual quests for total control and dominance of others.

And theocrats are convinced their particular splinter of a schism is the ultimate authority on earth as well as the entire universe. Stoning, beheadings and the hanging of transgressors and non-believers are arbitrarily justified by interpretations of their particular holy book.

There is much to fear when politicians exploit the religious beliefs of medical professionals in order to pass laws denying the rights of others to control their own bodies. This blatant pandering for votes by promising to deliver on religious wedge issues creates a positive feedback loop resulting in politicians being deified by their religious influencers. This is aided by a campaign of rationalization absolving them of their obvious failings. Such a campaign of apologetics by religious leaders is active and widespread in America as I type.

Examples include “God doesn’t call the qualified…He qualifies the called” (Exodus Chapter 4) and “God calls imperfect men to do His perfect will.” Is there even a red line where such “imperfect men” becomes an existential threat? Apparently not. I’m sure most citizens of the Third Reich didn’t think so until everything imploded.

The current Republican candidate for President is on the record as being a believer in the “racehorse theory” – the idea that selective breeding can improve a country’s performance, which American eugenicists and German Nazis used in the last century to buttress their goals of racial purity. On September 18, 2020 he told a mostly white crowd of supporters in Bemidji, Minn. “You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it? Don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”

This is one of many such statements he has made regarding genetics that has resulted in his personal superiority and that of his family. The New York Times reports “Mr. Trump was talking publicly about his belief that genetics determined a person’s success in life as early as 1988, when he told Oprah Winfrey that a person had ‘to have the right genes’ in order to achieve great fortune.”

These statements combined with those “about undocumented immigrants poisoning the blood” of America should equate to a 100 alarm fire.

Randy Souders is a Professional Artist, an Arts & Disability Advocate and has been Quadriplegic since 1972

By MIKE MAGEE

On May 16, 2017 New York Times conservative columnist, Russ Douthat, wrote “The 25th Amendment Solution for Removing Trump.” 

That column was the starting point for a Spring course I taught on the 25th Amendment at the President’s College in Hartford, CT. I will not summarize the entire course here, but would like to emphasize four points:

1. The American public was adequately warned (now 7 years ago) of the risk that Trump represented to our nation and our democracy.
2. Douthat’s piece triggered a journalistic debate which I summarize below with four slides drawn from my lectures.
3. Had Pence and the cabinet chosen to activate the 25th Amendment, as it is written, Trump would have had the right to appeal “his inability”, forcing the Congress to decide whether there was cause to remove the President.
4. Judging from the later impeachment of Trump in the House, but failure to convict in the Senate, it is unlikely a courageous Pence and Cabinet would have been backed by their own party.

Let’s look at four archived slides from the 2017 lecture, and then discuss our current options in the case of 2024 Trump against Democracy. 

Slide 1. Russ Douthat

        Slide 2. Jamal Greene (in response)

        Slide 3. Dahlia Lithwick (in response in SLATE)

        Slide 4. The 25th Amendment 

In 2017, Scott Bomboy, chief of the National Constitution Center, wrote:

“Section 4 is the most controversial part of the 25th Amendment: It allows the Vice President and either the Cabinet, or a body approved ‘by law’ formed by Congress, to jointly agree that ‘the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.’ This clause was designed to deal with a situation where an incapacitated President couldn’t tell Congress that the Vice President needed to act as President.”

“It also allows the President to protest such a decision, and for two-thirds of Congress to decide in the end if the President is unable to serve due to a condition perceived by the Vice President, and either the Cabinet or a body approved by Congress. So the Cabinet, on its own, can’t block a President from using his or her powers if the President objects in writing. Congress would settle that dispute and the Vice President is the key actor in the process.” What might have been (but was not) would have played out this way according to Constitutional scholars:

“… scholars Brian C. Kalt and David Pozen explain the problematic process if the Vice President and the Cabinet agree the President can’t serve.”

1. “If this group declares a President ‘unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,’ the Vice President immediately becomes Acting President.
2. If and when the President pronounces himself able, the deciding group has four days to disagree.
3. If it does not, the President retakes his powers.
4. But if it does, the Vice President keeps control while Congress quickly meets and makes a decision…
5. The Vice President continues acting as President only if two-thirds majorities of both chambers agree that the President is unable to serve.”

Had our leaders followed Russ Douthat’s advice seven years ago, it is highly unlikely that a 2/3rds majority of both chambers of Congress would have had their back. Instead, they went for Impeachment and failed, as Republicans chose rather to let voters decide. And they did, in 2020.

Few likely envisioned that mentally deranged (now former) President  Trump would launch a January 6th insurrection, embolden white nationalists militia across the nation, and follow thru on threats to run and win a 2nd term in 2024–intending to then free his followers from jail, to then fill their cells with those who attempted to hold him accountable for his historic misdeeds.

The 25th Amendment is no more a solution today than it was in 2017. Instead citizens loyal to our form of government rely in 2024 on two protective backstops:

1. Our third pillar of government – The Courts (most especially the Supreme Court.
2. The voter, whose second day of reckoning fast approaches.

Some believe we are once again engaged in a great Civil War. In its’ summary of the Gettysburg Address, National Geographic states that “Despite (or perhaps because of) its brevity, since (Abraham Lincoln’s) speech was delivered, it has come to be recognized as one of the most powerful statements in the English language and, in fact, one of the most important expressions of freedom and liberty in any language.”

The last paragraph of that two minute speech, delivered now 180 years and two months ago, reminds us that Americans died on “the battlefield” on January 6, 2021 defending our democratic government, and Lincoln’s words are today, more relevant than ever.

As described by historians, Lincoln made it clear that the stakes could not have been higher, well before the Dobbs decision and the appropriation of Hitler’s words by Trump. “Lincoln tied the current struggle to the days of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, speaking of the principles that the nation was conceived in: liberty and the proposition that all men are created equal. Moreover, he tied both to the abolition of slavery—a new birth of freedom—and the maintenance of representative government.

As they were spoken, November 19, 1863, here are Lincoln’s final words, ones that deserve a most careful reading: “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and regular contributor to THCB. He is the author of CODE BLUE: Inside America’s Medical Industrial Complex.

By MIKE MAGEE

On the evening of December 29, 1940, with election to his 3rd term as President secured, FDR delivered these words as part of his sixteenth “Fireside Chat”: “There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness…No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it.”

Millions of Americans, and millions of Britains were tuned in that evening, as President Roosevelt made clear where he stood while carefully avoiding over-stepping his authority in a nation still in the grips of a combative and isolationist opposition party.

That very evening, the Germans Luftwaffe, launched their largest yet raid on the financial district of London. Their “fire starter” group, KGr 100, initiated the attack with incendiary bombs that triggered fifteen hundred fires that began a conflagration ending in what some labeled the The Second Great Fire of London. Less than a year later, on the eve of another Christmas, we would be drawn into the war with the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Now, 83 Christmases later, with warnings of “poisoning the blood of our people,” we find ourselves contending with our own Hitler here at home.  Trump is busy igniting white supremacist fires utilizing the same vocabulary and challenging the boundaries of decency, safety and civility. What has the rest of the civilized world learned in the meantime?

First, appeasement does not work. It expands the vulnerability of a majority suffering the “tyranny of the minority.”

Second, the radicalized minority will utilize any weapon available, without constraint, to maintain and expand their power.

Third, the battle to save and preserve democracy in these modern times is never fully won. We remain in the early years of this deadly serious conflict, awakened from a self-induced slumber on January 6, 2020.

Hitler was no more an “evil genius” than is Trump. But both advantaged historic and cultural biases and grievances, leveraging them and magnifying them with deliberate lies and media manipulation. Cultures made sick by racism, systemic inequality, hopelessness, patriarchy, and violence, clearly can be harnessed for great harm. But it doesn’t take a “genius.” Churchill never called Hitler a “genius.” Most often he only referred to him as “that bad man.”

The spectacle and emergence of Kevin McCarthy, followed by Mike Johnson, as Speaker of the House, and the contrasting address by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries as he handed over the gavel, represent just one more skirmish in this “War for Democracy.” 

If our goal is a “healthier” America – one marked by compassion, understanding and partnership; one where fear and worry are counter-acted by touch and comfort; one where linkages between individuals, families, communities and societies are constructed to last – all signals confirm that the time is now to fight with vigor.

As Churchill vowed on his first day as Prime Minister, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” At about the same time, FDR offered this encouragement, “We have no excuse for defeatism. We have every good reason for hope — hope for peace, yes, and hope for the defense of our civilization and for the building of a better civilization in the future.”

The re-emergence of white supremacists and nationalists, theocratic and patriarchal censorship, and especially post-Dobbs attacks on women’s freedom and autonomy, are real and substantial threats to our form of government. They indeed are minority views, but no more so than the minority in 1940 which allowed a small group of “bad men” to harness a relatively small nation of 70 million people into a force that very nearly conquered the world.

Following the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Churchill packed his bags and headed directly to a British battleship for the 10-day voyage in rough seas (filled with German U-boats) to Norfolk, VA. Hours after arrival he was aboard a U.S. Navy plane for the 140 mile trip to the White House which he entered in a double breasted peacoat and a naval cap, chomping on a cigar. He would remain the guest of the Roosevelts for the next three weeks, heading home on January 14, 1942.

On Christmas Eve, he joined the President on the South Portico of the White House for the lighting of the White House Christmas tree. Here is what Churchill said to the President’s guests and 15,000 onlookers: “Let the children have their night of fun and laughter. Let gifts of Father Christmas delight their play. Let us share to the full in their unstinted pleasures before we turn again to the stern tasks and formidable year that lie before us. Resolve! – that by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed their inheritance and denied their right to live in a free and decent world.”

He spent the following day working on a speech to be delivered to a Joint Meeting of Congress on December 26, 1941, the kind of a Pep talk all good and decent people of America could benefit from today.  As we ourselves have learned since January 6, 2021, Churchill was right to warn us of complacency and caution, and that “many disappointments and unpleasant surprises await us.” 

He was clear and concise when he warned that day that Hitler and his Nazis (whom Trump so openly admires) possessed powers that “are enormous; they are bitter; they are ruthless.” But these “wicked men…know they will be called to terrible account…Now, we are the masters of our fate…The task which has been set is not above our strength. Its’ pangs and trials are not beyond our endurance.”

“Trump will be defeated,” he would say were he with us today. “You may be sure of that!” But we must be up to the task – brave, organized, and strategic. Now is the time, and as the British Times of London editorial reminded in 1942, as Churchill set foot once again on homeland after his American visit, timing is everything. “His visit to the United States has marked a turning-point of the war. No praise can be too high for the far-sightedness and promptness of the decision to make it.”

Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian, a regular THCB contributor, and the author of CODE BLUE: Inside America’s Medical Industrial Complex.

By MIKE MAGEE

This week, as a fourth indictment came due, a tragic Donald Trump headed back to social media, digging himself into a hole that will eventually lead to some personal hell. But before Donald Trump, there was William Frederick Kohler.

He made his appearance on the American stage on February 28, 1995, an historian who had just completed his “Great Work” – The Guilt and Innocence of Hitler’s Germany. He was odd and dark and duplicitous. His life’s work was ready to go. All that was left was to write the introduction to his book. Instead his attention was diverted, as he followed his impulse to memorialize his own story dedicated to the “concealment of history beneath my exposition of it.”

Secretive and opaque, he was focused on a very special audience he labeled the “Party of the Disappointed People”, a group with whom he shared the affinity “that the loss has been caused in great part by others.” He hid the pages of the new and very personal (but incomplete) story from wife Marta inside the pages of the near completed Nazi history. And for some reason, he inexplicably headed to his basement and began to dig a tunnel to escape (or uncover) evil.

Kohler, like Trump, was not normal. Those who have analyzed his character describe him this way:  “Preoccupied with evil, the nature of truth, and the effects of an individual’s relationship with others, he recalls his bookish childhood with a mother who drank to remember the ‘good old days’ and a bigoted father; graduate work in prewar Germany, where he hurled a brick on Kristallnacht; his unhappy marriage; and the lost love of his life, Lou, a former student. Kohler’s story exhibits the same inconsistencies and deceits he finds in history: Kohler, the personal memoirist … is as unreliable as Kohler, the eminent historian. A virtuoso performance without a grand finale.”

Kohler is the fictional creation of philosopher and novelist William H. Gass, author of the award winning novel, “The Tunnel.”  The author is described in the opening line of his 2017 New York Times obituary as “a proudly postmodern author who valued form and language more than literary conventions like plot and character.” He died on December 7 of that year, at age 93, in St. Louis, where he had taught philosophy and linguistics for 30 years. Born in Fargo, North Dakota, he was translocated to Warren, Ohio at 6 months, and raised according to his own account by “an abusive, racist father and a passive, alcoholic mother.” These revealing personal details trace back to a writing style he developed and labeled, “metafiction,” or stories in which the author inserts himself.

Of more relevance to America’s current political dilemma is that Gass received his PhD from Cornell in 1954, in return for his dissertation “A Philosophical Investigation of Metaphor.” A metaphor, as we know, is “a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them (as in drowning in money).”

Gass’s love of metaphor is on full display in “The Tunnel”.  You can almost hear the beloved high school advanced placement English teacher pleadingly asking her sleepy students “What do you think the tunnel represents?” Of the novel, one critic wrote, “As the novel progresses we see the lies, half-truths, violent emotions, and relative chaos of Kohler’s life laid bare, and while he continues to dig away at the memories of his past he also begins digging a tunnel out from the basement where he works, a reflection of his tunneling through himself.”

Beyond Gass’s own story line, and that of William Frederick Kohler, one can easily catch glimpses of  Donald Trump.  As he entered the strange world of politics, he embraced the use of metaphor with memorable 3 and 4 world phrases like “drain the swamp”, “the system is rigged,” and “take our country back.”

Andrew Hines, PhD,  a specialist on the history of metaphor theory in the western tradition, traced the use of metaphor back to ancient times, to leaders seeking control of the “body politic.”  Reflecting on Trump’s rise in 2016, he wrote: “In classical rhetoric, Aristotle even went so far as to say that the ability to discern these types of similarities was a sign of genius. As he saw it, a similarity between two things – a workforce and an army, say – can generate a new type of meaning for the listener. It can collapse all the complex problems and ideas together and thereby make them both intelligible and gripping.”

Trump mixes old, worn out “dead” metaphors like “take our country back” with occasional “live” ones. When he hits the mark, he makes news. For example, in a 2016 foreign policy speech, he used the metaphor, “shake the rust off American foreign policy” only to have it within days appropriated as a headline in the Financial Times.

Some have described Trump’s fragmented, sometimes confusing and incoherent style as “metaphorical chaos.” But Georgetown linguistics professor Jennifer Sclafani has suggested it is intentional, commenting that his speeches “may come off as incoherent and unintelligible when we compare it with the organized structure of other candidates’ answers. On the other hand, his conversational style can also help construct an identity for him as authentic, relatable and trustworthy, which are qualities that voters look for in a presidential candidate.”

Dr. Sclafani is the inventor of the term, “idiolect,” which she is careful to remind “is not the language of idiots, but an idiosyncratic form of language that is unique to an individual.” Nonetheless, she believes Trump’s style qualifies and works as authentic and relatable. His supporters, to deploy another metaphor, see him as “a straight shooter.” The problem for him now is complex. He has run out of targets who care what he says, and the hole he has dug has left him increasingly isolated even from those who fear him the most.

In the classic 2010 New Yorker article titled “Tocqueville in America” by literary critic James Wood, the writer picks apart some of Tocqueville’s less flattering observations about the nation he visited as a French aristocratic traveler in 1831. Considering the epic two volume “Democracy in America,” he prophetically lets loose with these words, “In the book’s second volume, he warns that modern democracy may be adept at inventing new forms of tyranny, because radical equality could lead to the materialism of an expanding bourgeoisie and to the selfishness of individualism… In such conditions, we might…meekly allow ourselves to be led in ignorance by a despotic force all the more powerful because it does not resemble one…”

Sadly, his words remind of another influential essayist, Kenneth Burke, whose 1939 masterpiece, The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle, is required reading for graduate students from English to Philosophy, and from Political Science to History and Religious Studies. The piece’s main focus involves a critical analysis of Hitler’s Mein Kampf (“my struggle”) which includes this stark warning.

Leaders of the free world need “to discover what kind of ‘medicine’ this medicine-man…concocted , that we may know, with greater accuracy, exactly what to guard against, if we are to forestall the concocting of similar medicine in America.”

Trump too has written his own fictional story; a despotic force with his own signature “idiolect”; as admiring of Nazism as William Kohler and as taken with sticky metaphors as William Gass in search of his own “Party of the Disappointed People.” Loyal indeed, like zombies, his followers and the Republican Party have followed him into the basement, and are heading down a tunnel which has no end. It has been  “a virtuoso performance without a grand finale.”

Mike Magee  MD is a Medical Historian and regular contributor to THCB. He is the author of CODE BLUE: Inside the Medical-Industrial Complex (Grove/2020)

By MIKE MAGEE

In 2002, psychologist Emily Pronin and her co-authors, in an article titled, You Don’t Know Me, But I Know You: The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight, laid out the concept of “Naive Realism.”

As she explained, “We insist that our ‘outsider perspective’ affords us insights about our peers that they are denied by their defensiveness, egocentricity, or other sources of bias. By contrast, we rarely entertain the notion that others are seeing us more clearly and objectively than we see ourselves. (We) talk when we would do well to listen…” Point well taken, but these (most would agree) are trying times.

The problem of our divisions is certainly worse now, two decades later, than when it was first labeled. 2023 headlines speak to “political polarization,” “division,” “factual inaccuracy,” and “loss of civility.”  And yet, we hold tight to the “rightness”of justice under the law, and set out to demonstrate with extreme confidence that our democratic institutions, under assault, have mostly held.

Madison was well aware of extreme labeling of opponents as “unreasonable, biased, or ill-motivated.” He warned on February 8, 1788 in Federalist 51 that “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In forming a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” His solution? Our legal system, and  checks and balances.

Hamilton, in the first paragraph of Federalist 1, tees up the same issue, in the form of an unsettling warning. He writes, “It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”

The “force” on January 6 was no accident. Hours before the armed insurrection of Congressthat morning, USA Today published  “By the numbers: President Trump’s failed efforts to overturn the election.” The article led with, “Trump and allies filed scores of lawsuits, tried to convince state legislatures to take action, organized protests and held hearings. None of it worked…Out of the 62 lawsuits filed challenging the presidential election (in state and federal courts), 61 have failed…Some cases were dismissed for lack of standing and others based on the merits of the voter fraud allegations. The decisions have came from both Democratic-appointed and Republican-appointed judges – including federal judges appointed by Trump.”

By all accounts, our nation and her citizens, owe our Judicial branch (its judges, lawyers, and legal guideposts) a debt of gratitude.

Without hyperbole, now understanding Trump for who and what he is, our Judiciary saved our democracy – for the moment. Literally thousands of lawyers were engaged, heard rational and irrational arguments from multiple sides, considered evidence and facts (or their absence), and decided these cases under urgent conditions on their merits.

Much of the credit goes to attorney Marc Elias (Duke Law School/1993), a voting rights expert, who headed the team that resisted the “Elite Strike Force Legal Team” in the 62 cases above. The six Trump co-conspirators who led the Strike Force were long on credentials and short on ethics and values. They included Rudy Guiliani (NYU/1968), John Eastman (U. Chicago/1995), Sidney Powell (UNC/1978), Jeffrey Clark (Georgetown/1995), Kenneth Chesebro (Harvard/1986), and Boris Epshteyn, alleged #6 (Georgetown/2007.)

As Attorney Elias  reminds us, “In the intervening years since the 2020 election, many of these lawyers have become objects of ridicule, the punchline in jokes. But mocking the lawyers who facilitated Trump’s criminal conduct risks minimizing their culpability. More importantly, it obscures the deep and problematic culture that appears to pervade the ranks of the Republican legal establishment…The indictment makes clear that this was not a conspiracy of sleazy political operatives or even violent insurrectionists. Instead, the indictment reveals that this attack on democracy was effectuated by lawyers using bad faith legal maneuvers and intentional acts…Over and over, the indictment alleges that these lawyers enabled and carried out a criminal conspiracy against democracy in an attempt to “disenfranchise millions of voters.” Trump may have been the ringleader, but he alone could not have filed frivolous lawsuits, enticed fake electors with concocted legal theories or used the law to try to pressure the vice president.”

If “societies of men are really capable… of establishing good government from reflection and choice,” we need a Judiciary steeped in values and the law, people like Marx Elias. As well, we need to hold lawyers who have disgraced their alma maters and dishonored their profession to be brought to justice. The place for that is not the public square where “asymmetric insights” might be questioned or challenged as concocted or biased. Rather, it is in a court of law, with camera and lights, where Guiliani, Eastman, Powell, Clark, Chesebro and Epshteyn (alleged), may be afforded the very rights they worked so diligently to undermine.

In a 2021 discussion of the role of lawyers and law schools in fostering civil public debate, Jennifer Robbennolt and Vikram Omar write, “Lawyers are not immune from these human tendencies. But good lawyers have, and good law schools teach, values, knowledge, and skills that can aid in fostering and modeling more productive debate and resolution of conflict.”

Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and regular contributor to THCB. He is the author of CODE BLUE: Inside the Medical Industrial Complex

By MIKE MAGEE

If you wanted to create a motto for the summer of 2023 – one that would stand the test of time from the medical exam room of Ohio to the gilded bathroom of Mar-a-lago – it would have to be Jack Smith’s “Facts matter!” If that is true on a national scale, it is equally true in states across the nation where doctors increasingly are coming out from behind a self-imposed clinical curtain and going public.

As reported in ProPublica last week, “Doctors who previously never mixed work with politics are jumping into the abortion debate by lobbying state lawmakers, campaigning, forming political action committees and trying to get reproductive rights protected by state law.”

A few examples:

1. One thousand Ohio doctors signed a full-page ad titled “A Message to our Patients on the loss of Reproductive Rights” in the Columbus Dispatch in response to actions of a state legislature highjacked by radicalized Republicans enacting a 6-week abortion ban post the Dobbs decision. This was after their coalition delivered a protest letter with 700,000 signatures earlier to the State House.

2. Dr. Damla Karsan, a Houston obstetrician, faced off Texas legislators  on July 20th, lending truth to power when she said , ““I feel like I’m being handicapped. I’m looking for clarity, a promise that I will not be persecuted for providing care with informed consent from patients that someone interprets is not worthy of the medical exception.”

3. In Nebraska, the doctor-led “Campaign for a Healthy Nebraska” raised $400,000 to hire political consultants to launch a women’s health rights campaign which helped the Nebraska Medical Society “find its inner voice” and openly oppose abortion restrictions in that state. State Senator Danielle Conrad was impressed. She said, “It’s really just incredible from my vantage point to see how these doctors have been able to not be hobbled by those decades of political baggage, to step forward with this fresh, clear medical perspective and be able to engage more people.”

4. A month earlier, Dr’s Katie McHugh, Gabriel Bosslet, Caroline Rouse and Tracey Wilkinson penned an Op-Ed in STAT in support of their colleague, Dr. Caitland Bernard, who had come to the rescue of a 10 year old Ohio rape victim who had fled to Indiana to gain access to an abortion. Caitlin was shamefully fined $3,000 by the Indiana State Licensing Board. Her colleagues wrote, “While a relatively minor punishment, this finding should send a chill through the medical community and beyond. But that chill shouldn’t be silencing.”

5. In Michigan, a doctor-led group, the Committee to Protect Health Care, teamed up with the ACLU, and successfully passed “Proposal 3”,  a “constitutional amendment to enshrine reproductive rights into the state constitution.” Dr. Rob Davidson declared, “This is a historic victory for reproductive rights in Michigan, and the Committee to Protect Health Care was proud to help get Proposal 3 across the finish line.”

Yesterday’s indictment of  Donald Trump, the citizen, squarely places him and his legislative enablers in Washington and Republican led state houses across our nation, on the wrong side of the truth. As reported, he is accused of “three conspiracies: one to defraud the United States; a second to obstruct an official government proceeding, the certification of the Electoral College vote; and a third to deprive people of a civil right, the right to have their votes counted.”

But what he and his Republican supporters in Washington and state houses across the nation are primarily guilty of, is not simply lying and deceit, but attempting to destroy our democracy and disenfranchise our voters. That is why prosecution under Civil Rights statutes employed in the past to address the savagery of the KKK, are totally appropriate here. Jack Smith’s “stand tall” leadership is a model for us all, and that includes our doctors and nurses.

As I have repeatedly argued, the health of our democracy is inseparably interwoven with the health of our system of caring for each other. At the helm of this system, our health professionals have survived the hurricane force winds of a pandemic, an inequitable and inefficient health delivery system, and a medical-industrial complex that is more focused on seizing patents than serving patients.

And yet, today we take heart. Our physicians, in growing numbers, are rediscovering their strength and their voices. Like Jack Smith, they are speaking up, in opposition to a small group of bitter and evil leaders, who have earned our active condemnation, and now must face the weight of the law.

Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian, regular THCB contributor, and the author of CODE BLUE: Inside the Medical-Industrial Complex.

BY MIKE MAGEE

As we enter a new and potentially historic week, with a former President doing his best to reignite a Civil War in our nation, we do well to take a breath and reread James Madison’s words from Federalist No. 51. But first, a few words of history.

When it came to checks and balances in this new national experiment in self governance, the Founders, while establishing three co-equal branches, left one of those branches the task of defining by practice its own power and influence.

The new Constitution in 1787 awarded one branch, the elected Congress, the daunting power to impeach, convict and remove representatives or appointed federal officials for due cause up to the President himself. But it also empowered a second branch, the Executive, through its President, veto power to check legislative excesses and the privilege of initiating appointments to the federal judiciary. Only the third branch of the government, the Judiciary, was left deliberately “elastic,” destined to grow into “the triangle of power.”

Thirteen years later, on February 17, 1801, Congress was forced to break a tie in the Electoral College vote, resolving a Constitutional crisis and declaring a victor in one of “the most acrimonious presidential campaigns” in U.S. history. Thomas Jefferson was awarded the victory, and John Adams acquiesced and was sent packing a month later. But two days before he departed, Adams unloaded multiple appointments of circuit justices and justices of the peace which the U.S. Senate quickly confirmed on March 3rd. In the rush, Adam’s Secretary of State, John Marshall (soon to become Chief Justice Marshall of the Supreme Court under President Jefferson) didn’t have time to complete a final necessary step, delivering the commissions, to some of the appointees.

When Jefferson took office on March 4th, and saw the opportunity to block some judgeships on the technicality, he instructed his new Secretary of State, James Madison, to not deliver the commissions. One of those prospective new judges, a Maryland businessman, William Marbury, after trying to unlock his commission for several months, filed a lawsuit in December, 1801 demanding that his commission be delivered through a “writ of mandamus.” ( “an order from a court to an inferior government official ordering the government official to properly fulfill their official duties or correct an abuse of discretion.”)

Eventually the case came to the Supreme Court and John Marshall delivered the unanimous verdict on February 24, 1803 in Marbury v. Madison. 

In short, William Marbury did not get his judgeship, but not because he didn’t deserve it. He did, and the decision said as much. But the Court also recognized that the authority that Section 13 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 had granted the Court to issue “writs of mandamus” (and effectively force Secretary of State Madison to deliver the appointment) was unconstitutional. 

This was because Article III of the U.S. Constitution  (signed September 17, 1787) made clear that the Supreme Court had “original jurisdiction over cases only where a U.S. state is party to the lawsuit.” As legal experts have explained: While the decision “limited federal court’s jurisdiction, it cemented the Court’s status as the ultimate interpreter of the Constitution.”

William Marbury’s loss became our nation’s gain. Our third branch of government, in finding its voice, defined its own powers. As Justice Marshall wrote “It is emphatically the province and duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is…a Law repugnant to the Constitution is void.” As law historian Lawrence Friedman wrote, “Here for the first time John Marshall in the U.S. Supreme Court dared to declare an act of Congress to be unconstitutional.”

Donald Trump, for a time, sat himself in the middle of America’s triangle of power. From his seat as President, he installed himself as “a Golden Idol” and had a commanding view of the Executive branch of government. By aligning with the Federalist Society, the Christian Right and Mitch McConnell, he was able to stack the Judiciary and deliver a promised reversal of Roe v. Wade. But that federal overreach, which included rejecting  50 years of precedent and compromising women’s freedom and autonomy over their own bodies, fueled a resounding 2020 Trump defeat and Republican statewide under-performance in the 2022 Mid-term elections.

It also triggered a first ever President-led armed insurrection on January 6, 2021. But in a real-life “Democracy stress test,” this may be the moment when our three branches of government finally deliver a message to all Americans that no man is above the law. 

First, our citizenry pried the Executive branch free of Trump in 2020. 

Second, our Judiciary, including state and federal courts, have rejected nearly 100 bogus cases led by unethical lawyers on Trump’s behalf, and are nearing multiple indictments of a now, unprotected and disgraced former President. 

Third,  a Republican led Congress has been forced to privately cooperate on real issues, while publicly feigning continued fealty to Trump and a small band of Trump look-alike’s intent on driving their party over the cliff.

So what did James Madison, author of Federalist No. 51, have to say about all this? 

On February 8, 1788, he wrote: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In forming a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

Trump is a stress test, and our nation is rising to the challenge. We are gradually, slowly and painfully, learning to “control ourselves” by enforcing our laws. Democracy is a work in progress.

Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and author of CODE BLUE: Inside the Medical-Industrial Complex.

By MIKE MAGEE

On the evening of December 29, 1940, with election to his 3rd term as President secured, FDR delivered these words as part of his sixteenth “Fireside Chat”: “There can no appeasement with ruthlessness…No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it.”

Millions of Americans, and millions of Britons were tuned in that evening, as President Roosevelt made clear where he stood while carefully avoiding over-stepping his authority in a nation still in the grips of a combative and isolationist opposition party.

The Germans were listening as well and sent a different type of message as the Luftwaffe, in concert with the address, launched their largest yet raid on the financial district of London. Their “fire starter” group, KGr 100, initiated the attack with incendiary bombs that triggered fifteen hundred fires that began a conflagration ending in what some labeled the “Second Great Fire of London.”

There was nothing happenstance about the timing or methods of the attack. The night was moonless, keeping RAF fighters lacking air-to-air radar grounded. There were high winds to fan the flames that night. High explosive bombs were used to target water mains to hamper fire fighters, and the Thames was at low tide making accessing it for a water supply neigh impossible.

Combined with Roosevelt’s words, the actions of December 29, 1940, now 82 years later, highlight two truisms when confronting evil orchestrated at the hands of racist, autocratic leaders.

First, appeasement does not work. It expands the vulnerability of a majority suffering the “tyranny of the minority.”

Second, the radicalized minority will utilize any weapon available, without constraint, to maintain and expand their power.

The battle to save democracy in these modern times has not been won. As was FDR at the time of his address, we are in the early years of this deadly serious conflict, and still in catch-up mode, awakened from a self-induced slumber on January 6, 2020.

Hitler was no more an “evil genius” than was Trump. But both advantaged historic and cultural biases and grievances, leveraging them and magnifying them with deliberate lies and media manipulation. Cultures made sick by racism, systemic inequality, hopelessness, patriarchy, and violence, as it turns out, can be harnessed for great harm. But it doesn’t take a “genius.” Churchill never called Hitler a “genius.” Most often he only referred to him as “that bad man.”

The spectacle and emergence of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House, and the contrasting address by Hakeem Jeffries as he handed over the gavel, represent just one more skirmish in this “War for Democracy.”  If our goal is a “healthier” America – one marked by compassion, understanding and partnership; one where fear and worry are counter-acted by touch and comfort; one where linkages between individuals, families, communities and societies are constructed to last – all signals confirm that the time is now to fight with vigor. As Churchill vowed on his first day as Prime Minister, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” At about the same time, FDR offered this encouragement, “We have no excuse for defeatism. We have every good reason for hope — hope for peace, yes, and hope for the defense of our civilization and for the building of a better civilization in the future.”

The rise of white supremacists and nationalists, theocratic and patriarchal censorship, and especially post-Dobbs attacks on women’s freedom and autonomy, are both real and substantial threats to our form of government. They indeed are minority views, but no more so than the minority in 1940 who allowed a small group of “bad men” to harness a relatively small nation of 70 million people into a force that very nearly conquered the world.

On December 7, 1941, we Americans were “awakened from our slumber” by the attack on Pearl Harbor. Churchill reached Roosevelt that night, and FDR said, “They have attacked us at Pearl Harbor. We are all in the same boat now.” A few weeks later, Churchill arrived in a battleship, docked off Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. Shuttled from there by plane, he witnessed Washington aglow, quite a contrast to his own blacked-out London. He stayed as a guest in the White House, and on Christmas Eve was asked to make a few remarks.

Here is what he said to the President’s guests, and (I suggest) to us today:

“Let the children have their night of fun and laughter. Let gifts of Father Christmas delight their play. Let us grown-ups share to the full in their unstinted pleasures before we turn again to the stern tasks and formidable year that lie before us. Resolve! – that by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed their inheritance and denied their right to live in a free and decent world.”

Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and author of“CODE BLUE: Inside the Medical-Industrial Complex

BY MIKE MAGEE

Should anyone present know of any reason that this couple should not be joined in holy matrimony, speak now or forever hold your peace.”     Book of Common Prayer, Church of England, 1549

Last evening Trump rose from the ashes and declared it was time to “Make America Great and Glorious Again” (MAGAGA).

This past week, five days after the Midterm elections, AMA President, Jack Resnick, Jr., MD, raised his voice from the podium at the AMA Interim Meeting in Hawaii with the AMA’s own version of a call to action:

“But make no mistake, when politicians insert themselves in our exam rooms to interfere with the patient-physician relationship, when they politicize deeply personal health decisions, or criminalize evidence-based care, we will not back down…I never imagined colleagues would find themselves tracking down hospital attorneys before performing urgent abortions, when minutes count … asking if a 30% chance of maternal death, or impending renal failure, meet the criteria for the state’s exemptions … or whether they must wait a while longer, until their pregnant patient gets even sicker…Enough is enough. We cannot allow physicians or our patients to become pawns in these lies.”

Over a year ago, they had signaled awareness that attacks on Roe v. Wade might fundamentally challenge patient autonomy and the sanctity of the patient-physician relationship. On September 21, 2021, the AMA with 25 other medical organizations filed an amicus brief in opposition to the restrictive Mississippi abortion law, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.  And on  October 12, 2021, 19 medical societies, with the AMA in the lead, filed  an amicus brief in U.S. v. Texas, the abortion vigilante law signed by Gov. Greg Abbott.

Over the past year, the AMA had ample warning that the situation was spinning out of control. On June 27, 2022, I wrote: “My concern today, despite the strong messaging from Chicago, is that the AMA and its membership have not fully absorbed that this is a ‘mission-critical’ moment in the organization’s history… The strong words, without actions to back them up will permanently seal the AMA’s fate, and challenge Medicine’s status as a ‘profession.’”

I was reacting to the AMA’s statement three days earlier, on release of the Dobbs decision, which labeled the decision “an egregious allowance of government intrusion into the medical examination room, a direct attack on the practice of medicine and the patient-physician relationship…the AMA condemns the high court’s interpretation in this case. We will always have physicians’ backs and defend the practice of medicine, we will fight to protect the patient-physician relationship.”

At the time, I recommended that the AMA mobilize and orchestrate their Federation state and specialty societies to pursue acts of “physician ‘civil disobedience’ where appropriate to protect the health and well being of all women, regardless of age, race, sexual identity, religion, or economic status.”

This warning came six months after I highlighted Charles Dickens words in a “Tale of Two Cities” – “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, …” – as a way to dramatize that we too are a “tale of two cities”  as this map of the United States, color coded for regressive legislation and tactics to disenfranchise women and children, people of color, the poor and the vulnerable, well illustrates.

On November 8, 2022, the AMA site posted a section titled “Advocacy in action: Protecting reproductive health.” But a constructive critic would be justified in suggesting that the plan is tall on “advocacy”, but short on “action.”

What does “action” look like? In Part 2 of this piece, I’ll provide examples from Michigan, Kansas, Kentucky, and Washington.

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Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and author of “CODE BLUE: Inside the Medical Industrial Complex.”

By MIKE MAGEE

When awakening from a long sleep, there is a transition period, when the brain struggles momentarily to become oriented, to “think straight.” When the sleep has extended four years, as with the Trump reign, it takes longer to clear the sleepy lies from your eyes.

We are emerging, but it will take time and guidance. This week President Biden and our First Lady showed us the way. As we together observed the startling passage of a half million dead, many needlessly, from the pandemic, the President gave us a crash course on grief. He compared it to entering a “black hole”, and acknowledged that whether you “held the hand” as your loved one passed on, or were unable (by logistics or regulation) to be there to offer comfort, time would heal. “You have to believe me, honey!”, as he is so prone to say.

As important, we saw the First Lady, without fanfare or concious need for attention, at one moment, draw close to him, as she sensed that he was about to be overcome by his own sadness, and place her hand simply on his back, patting him gently, knowing that this was enough to get him through. She, by then, had done this many times before.

And we saw the Vice President and her husband, across from the first couple, there only for support. This was neither a speaking role or super-ceremonial. It was humble. It was supportive. It was human, and far away from a predecessor who for four years had to fawn, and lie, and grovel to satisfy his Commander-in-Chief.

As these four lead us back to sanity, we as a body politic are fast at work doing three things as once:

1. We are addressing this pandemic with vaccines and good public health processes, and managing our emotional and economic grief and shock.

2. We are beginning to address all the other challenges left unaddressed that demand “good government” whether they be getting kids back to school, or reforming police practice, or turning on the electricity in Houston.

3. We are relearning how to respect the truth, tell the truth, and demand the truth. As Mandela taught the world in 1995, this is not as easy as it sounds. It requires that we reconcile with our past, reform our present, and resolve together to build a better future.

A simple example of these processes at work is addressing the lie that the Obama Administration had never created a pandemic plan, or warned the incoming Trump administration of the threat. This was a false narrative surfaced in May, 2020 by Trump administration officials, and reinforced by David Popp, Majority Leader McConell’s spokesperson, to aid Republican candidates.

Ronald Klain, Obama’s man-in-charge of the Ebola respose (and now Chief of Staff to Biden) then produced the actual plan, and multiple witnesses to the transition. These included  Jeremy Konyndyk, who directed USAID’s Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance, who said, “They were extensively briefed, to the extent that they paid attention to these things during the transition.” Then there was  Lisa Monaco, former homeland security adviser to President Obama, who affirmed, “We absolutely did leave a plan. It was called a playbook.”

Four days later, White House  press secretary Kayleigh McEnany was forced to acknowledge the existence of the Obama pandemic playbook, but then obfuscated with a discussion of what constituted a “game plan.”

This was a tricky proposition since the Appendix Materials in the 69 page document included: I. Declaration and Mitigation Options, II. Key Department and Agencies: International and Domestic, III. Sample Exercises, IV. Communications, V. Concept of Operations for Domestic Response.

But as we have tragically witnessed, setting the past record straight alone is inadeqaute absent power and control over the levers of government.  It took an election, and 5 dead from an insurrection at our Capitol on January 6th, to reclaim the present, and hopefully alter our future.

As difficult as that was, it leaves the critical third step ahead of us. Those who knowingly lied, who dishonored and spoiled the truth, must accept responsibility, apologize, and be held accountable. As Mandela taught us, this need not be punitive, but must be public, if trust and confidence in our Democracy is to be reestablished. Otherwise, history will repeat.

Mike Magee, MD is a Medical Historian and Health Economist and author of “Code Blue: Inside the Medical Industrial Complex.”