Mike Huckabee's moral blind spot

Whatever you are doing right now, let us all take a moment to thank Mike Huckabee for reminding us of the moral blindness that results from partisan thinking.

The former governor of Arkansas, sometime presidential aspirant and frequent commentator on Fox News suggested that President Donald Trump take a page from President Andrew Jackson, and just ignore court rulings that he doesn't like. Trump recently was blocked for a second time in an attempt to block Muslims from entering the country, by a federal judge in Honolulu. Jackson was told he couldn't relocate American Indians.

“Hoping @POTUS tells Hawaii judge what Andrew Jackson told overreaching court,” Huckabee tweeted from his official account on March 15. "'I'll ignore it and let the court enforce their order.'”

Huckabee appears to refer to Worcester v. Georgia, an 1832 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that established the legal foundations of tribal sovereignty of the American Indian peoples within the United States and ruled that they were not subject to state laws.

Among other things, this ruling served as a legal reprimand for the Jackson administration, which had been removing American Indians from the Southeast for two years.

Driven by an appetite for land to support the cotton industry, white settlers had been pushing into Indian territory in Georgia and creating increased conflict. Since 1830, the Jackson administration had been moving the Indians from the state to federal territory in modern Oklahoma.

Even after the court's ruling, which upheld the Indians' claim to their lands over Georgia's, Jackson refused to halt the relocation efforts. By 1840, the Creek, Choctaw, Seminole and Chickasaw nations all had been removed from lands east of the Mississippi under the Indian Relocation Act, on a death march that today we call the Trail of Tears.

Indians taken to their new lands often faced extreme weather, hunger and overcrowding that let disease cut through them like a sickle cuts through grain. Reports vary, but anywhere from 2,500 to 6,000 people died along the way. By 1837, the U.S. government had removed 46,000 Indians from the Southeast to claim about 25 million acres for predominantly white settlement.

That's Jackson's legacy, and like the incarceration of Japanese Americans under Roosevelt, it's not one any president, or former presidential candidate, should want to emulate.

Like Trump – and like Huckabee and other supporters of the president's ban on Muslim immigration, Jackson framed his actions as a matter of national security. Even more unbelievably, in a speech before Congress, Jackson framed forced relocation as the solution that would benefit the affected Indians.

Per the National Archives and Records Administration: "It will separate the Indians from immediate contact with settlements of whites; free them from the power of the States; enable them to pursue happiness in their own way and under their own rude institutions; will retard the progress of decay, which is lessening their numbers, and perhaps cause them gradually, under the protection of the Government and through the influence of good counsels, to cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilized, and Christian community.”

From the vantage point of 180 years later, we look back on Jackson and his actions with horror. The Trail of Tears was an act of genocide, and we should regard Jackson's decision to ignore the Supreme Court not as an act of courage or integrity, but as one of arrogance and cruelty.

This is what Huckabee hails as the example that the Trump administration should follow as he tries to restrict travel to our country by a group of people based solely on their religion — including Syrian refugees who already have endured a two-year vetting process.

Rather than accusing the court of judicial activism or overreach, Huckabee should stop and be grateful that the framers instituted a system of checks and balances so that each of our branches of government can keep the others from going off the rails.

Sometimes the courts do get things wrong — the Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson and Citizens United decisions all spring to mind, among others — but a decision that opposes naked bigotry is not one of those times.

Right now, it's the rule of law, and the rulings of our courts, that are keeping us from being complicit in another Trail of Tears.



Copyright © 2017 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Compassion is the highest law of all

As news reaches my ears of immigration officials arresting undocumented immigrants, I keep hearing one phrase repeated: "We are a nation of laws."

It is true, we are; and the rule of law is what historically has kept us from the tyranny of other nations. In our country, everyone is subject to the same laws as everyone else. No one can claim exemption by dint of birth, wealth, status or position.

We are a nation of laws, but we are a nation where punishment is always to be proportionate to the law broken. Separating parents from children, deporting dreamers who know no country but this one, and sending away people who have contributed to our communities for years -- this is not proportionate to the crime of living here without proper immigration papers.

We are a nation of laws, but we are a nation of people. We understand that there are extenuating circumstances -- economic distress, political unrest, threats to life and safety -- that may prompt people to do things that they know are illegal but that harm no one. We know that a one-size-fits-all solution is not a solution at all, but a convenience.

We are a nation of laws, but the highest law of all is to have compassion.

We are a nation of laws, but when we subjugate compassion, human decency, discretion and common sense to the law, we have made an idol of the law, made fear our master, and set ourselves on the road toward ruin.

Push back. Remember who we are as a nation, and don't let fear win the day.



Copyright © 2017 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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uniter in chief

I recently was told that President Bush has been trying to unite the different factions in the country, and not just in hating him. He also has worked with Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) on the recently failed immigration reform initiative.

Doubtless I'll be stomped to death for this if I'm incorrect, but I believe this is the first major initiative of the president's where he has reached across the aisle and worked with members of the other party. Six-and-a-half years into your presidency is a little late to start uniting.

Given the tone of his primary campaign in 2000, given the scorched-earth tone of the presidential election of 2004, and given his go-it-alone attitude on everything from backing out of the Kyoto Accords to deposing a foreign government against the express wishes of the international community and the United Nations (and given his oft-demonstrated willingness to shut out advisers who disagree with him or who offer advice he doesn't want to hear) ... you can count me among those who say he's not a uniter. I'll go a step further and say he's a lousy president too, all things considered.

I'll give the president credit, and say that (by and large) he is trying to do what he thinks is right. The problem is that too often, he's come at things with a with-me-or-against-me attitude, has not put forth a convincing case for his beliefs or attitudes, and still has expected people to see the perceived innate rightness of his actions. You can't govern like that, at least not in a democratically elected government like ours, where you need to build consensus, and persuade both allies and opponents, and yet that is how he consistently has tried to govern.

His presidency did get off to a good start, I suppose, with solid support for initiatives like No Child Left Behind and some of the other changes he made. Whatever capital he started out with, and it apparently included enough that some Democrats crossed the aisle to work with on those aforementioned efforts early in his first term, he's had one series of one high-profile mistep after another, not just with the war but domestically as well: the Miers appointment, the Gonzales appointment, and the recent immigration fiasco.

Of course, this is nothing new. If you look at Bush's record prior to the presidency, you'll see a man who consistently just squeaked by. Take someone like that and give him the most powerful office in the world, and he'll still just barely squeak by. The difference is that it's a much more spectacular squeak.

Bush had more clout on Capitol Hill early in his presidency and could get more accomplished because the GOP controlled both houses of Congress, and things were running in a more or less parliamentarian manner; i.e., the Legislative Branch backed many of the initiatives of the Executive Branch rather than Checks-and-Balance'ing them.

With the unpopularity of this war growing out of control and the lack of strategy beyond the "Depose Saddam" stage becoming clearer day by day, his rank-and-file support has been disappearing like rats from a sinking ship.

I'm hoping our next president is someone who really is going to unite us, someone who's going to be able to wave a banner and get the nation to rally together -- someone who won't fabricate a common bogeyman, someone who won't play to the lowest common denominator, and someone who takes a stand for something positive instead of standing against other things.