Rally 'round the stars, stripes, symbolism -- June 10, 2021 column

                                             -- Flag Day 1917 poster from Library of Congress collection

By MARSHA MERCER

When President Joe Biden addressed U.S. troops Wednesday in the United Kingdom, a gigantic American flag served as a backdrop. Servicemembers in camouflage behind him waved small American flags.

Presidents frequently use the flag to send messages. Biden’s huge flag on his first foreign trip telegraphed to the world that the United States is back as a player on the international stage.

President Donald Trump’s America First policies are history. And, thankfully, so are his antics as patriot in chief. On numerous occasions, Trump literally hugged the flag while mugging for the cameras. In 2020, he embraced and kissed the flag and mouthed the words, “I love you, baby.”

We ask an awful lot of Old Glory.

We proudly send the flag on our adventures on Earth and in space while at home we fight over how to pledge allegiance.

As originally written in 1892, the Pledge of Allegiance said: “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands: one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.”

The idea 27 years after the Civil War was to unite the country and to evoke the Declaration of Independence.

In 1923, “my flag” was changed to “the flag of the United States” in case immigrants had any doubt which to which flag were pledging.

During the Cold War, President Dwight Eisenhower prodded Congress to add “under God” after “one nation.” That change in 1954 set off lasting legal battles.

Few are neutral about the flag. Some revere the symbol but may or may not live up to its ideals. Some burn the symbol to protest violations of the flag’s ideals, and a few weaponize it.

It was truly sickening to see American flags used to commit violence Jan. 6 when pro-Trump rioters beat police with flags during the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

But, sadly, it wasn’t the first time the flag had been used as a weapon.

On April 5, 1976, during busing desegregation protests in Boston, a photo captured the moment a young, white man aimed the sharp point of a flagpole, the American flag attached, at a black man.

The photograph – “The Soiling of Old Glory” by Stanley Forman -- won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography.

We’ve fought over how to treat the flag for decades. Desecrating the flag was a crime until the Supreme Court ruled in Texas v. Johnson in 1989 that flag-burning was Constitutionally protected free speech, overturning anti-desecration laws.

It was President Richard Nixon who started the trend of wearing American flag pins on lapels. He was countering Vietnam War protesters who sewed flags on their shirts and the seats of their jeans. Other politicians, Republicans mostly, soon adopted the lapel pin.

During the 2016 presidential primary campaign, Barack Obama’s failure to wear a flag pin on his lapel caused a mini dust-up. Asked why wasn’t wearing one, Obama said he’d worn a flag pin after 9/11 but found some people who wear them don’t act patriotic. Instead, he said, he would tell people what he believed and show his patriotism that way.

Nice try. Obama’s reasoned response didn’t fly. After that he wore a flag pin on his lapel.

On Monday, we once again will honor the nation’s most iconic symbol on Flag Day. We celebrate on June 14 to commemorate the Continental Congress’s resolution on June 14, 1777:

Resolved, that the Flag of the thirteen United States shall be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the Union be thirteen stars, white on a blue field, representing a new constellation.

How hopeful our forefathers were to see the young country as united under its flag, a new constellation in the sky. That optimism has been tested as the number of stars has grown to 50, but it continues.

On Flag Day, many Americans will fly flags and wear lapel pins. So bring out the stars and the stripes.

Doing so should be an act for us all, not for one group or another. Our democracy may be messier than ever, but the flag belongs to us all, regardless of party or philosophy.

Now more than ever, we need our shared Old Glory.

©2021 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Watchdogs -- Never more needed, or endangered -- May 21, 2020 column

By MARSHA MERCER

An inspector general investigates wrongdoing by the head of a federal department who’s also a staunch presidential ally.

Boom! The president fires the inspector general. What now?

Sounds like a plot of a Netflix drama, but that’s roughly what happened last Friday night, when President Donald Trump fired Steve Linick, the State Department inspector general.

Linick, it seems, ran afoul of his boss by doing his job. Inspectors general are independent watchdogs inside federal departments and agencies who investigate corruption, misconduct and misuse of federal funds. 

Linick reportedly had launched an investigation into Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s use of agency staff for personal chores and into an $8 billion U.S. arms sale to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates without the approval of Congress.

Trump said he fired Linick because Pompeo asked him to do so. Pompeo said he didn’t know Linick was investigating him or the arms sale.

Linick was the fourth inspector general in six weeks Trump fired on a Friday night when most Americans were focused on the coronavirus pandemic and the economic meltdown.

Trump on May 1 said he was naming a new inspector general at Health and Human Service, moving aside Christi Grimm, the principal deputy inspector general.

Her office had issued a report about problems in 300 hospitals nationwide that were struggling without adequate equipment to respond to COVID-19, the deadly disease caused by the novel coronavirus – while Trump was bragging hospitals had everything they needed.

In April, Trump said he was replacing Glenn Fine, acting inspector general at Defense. The move means Fine is ineligible to lead a new panel charged with oversight of the trillions of dollars in pandemic relief funds recently approved by Congress.

Also in April, Trump fired Michael Atkinson, Trump’s own appointee as inspector general of the intelligence community. Atkinson had told Congress about the whistleblower complaint that led to Trump’s impeachment.

Trump says he lacked confidence in the inspectors general, but his Friday night massacres raise a larger question: What does his administration have to hide?

The firings also send a clear message to the dozens of IGs stationed around the federal government: To keep your job, avoid annoying the boss.

But we don’t have a king. The Constitution creates three equal branches of government, with checks and balances. All Americans, regardless of party, should demand inspectors general be protected so they can do their work on our behalf.  

In the wake of Watergate, Congress passed the Inspector General Act of 1978, authorizing a system of independent auditors and investigators to uncover and report on corruption in the federal bureaucracy.

Under the law, the president chooses and the Senate confirms inspectors “without regard to political affiliation and solely on the basis of integrity and demonstrated ability in accounting” and other financial specialties.

Of course, no president likes inspectors snooping around, but Trump said Monday, “Every president has gotten rid of probably more [inspector generals] than I have.” That’s wrong.

When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, he quickly tried to clean house of inspectors general. After a bipartisan uproar, though, he re-nominated five of the 15 he had fired, according to a new Congressional Research Service report.

A handful of other inspectors may have quit to avoid firing, the research service said in the May 12 report, but since 2000 only one president had fired any.

In 2009, President Barack Obama fired Gerald Walpin, IG of the Corporation for National Community Service, after Walpin investigated how grant money was used at a school in California run by former NBA basketball player Kevin Johnson. Johnson was a supporter of Obama and mayor of Sacramento.

“No one seemed to care” when Obama did the firing, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany complained this week. That’s also wrong. The Obama firing led to a bipartisan congressional effort to tighten rules on firing inspectors general. It failed.

At a time when inspectors general have never been more needed, or endangered, Trump would happily get rid of more.

And so we see a familiar pattern. Congressional Democrats raise alarms while almost all congressional Republicans sit silent.

If Congress won’t stop Trump from weakening watchdogs, the voters must remember come November.

©2020 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

If only the 2016 campaign could rise to poetry -- April 7, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

It’s National Poetry Month, so let us praise politicians who campaign in poetry in 2016.

Anyone . . . Anyone?

In the 1980s, Mario Cuomo could say without irony: “You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose.”

Obviously, Cuomo couldn’t have imagined today’s presidential contest when he made the distinction between the lofty words that inspire voters and the gritty compromises needed to make policy.

In January, the prospects for poetry in the campaign looked promising. When Bernie Sanders launched his brilliant ad using Simon and Garfunkel’s “America,” Hillary Clinton said she loved it.

“We need a lot more poetry in this campaign and in our country,” she told Chris Cuomo of CNN at a Democratic town hall in Iowa. “So I applaud that. I love the feeling. I love the energy.”

The feel-good feeling didn’t last. The campaign soon devolved from poetry to a coarse limerick.

Rare in 2016 is the presidential candidate who appeals to what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. Two exceptions: Democrat Martin O’Malley, who was given to recitations of Irish poetry, and Republican John Kasich, who stays more cheerful than combative in a campaign marked by insults, anger and ridicule.

We know how far quoting Eavan Boland by heart took O’Malley. We’ll see whether Kasich can parlay civility and thoughtfulness into anything higher than third place. Donald J. Trump’s wordsmithing begins and ends with taunts --“Lyin’ Ted,” meet “Low-energy Jeb.”

It wasn’t always like this.

“Our nation’s first great politicians were also among the nation’s first great writers and scholars,” then-Sen. John F. Kennedy recounted in a 1956 commencement address at Harvard, his alma mater. “Books were their tools, not their enemies.” He himself won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1957 for “Profiles in Courage.”

Americans’ appreciation for poetry is reflected in the fact that 42 states and the federal government have poets laureate.

The Virginia state Senate in February invited Virginia poet laureate James Ronald Smith, who teaches at St. Christopher’s School in Richmond, to read a poem on the Senate floor.

Margaret Britton Vaughn received a lifetime appointment as Tennessee’s poet laureate in 1996. Alabama poet laureate Andrew Glaze died in February at the age of 95.

The term of the U.S. poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera ends in May. Several presidents, starting with JFK, have invited poets to read at their inaugurations.

We celebrate National Poetry Month because the American Academy of Poets decided in 1996 that poetry should have its own month the way black history and women’s history do. It’s grown into the largest literary celebration in the world, the academy says.

At a poetry month celebration at the White House last April, President Barack Obama said: “The greatness of a country is not just the size of its military, or the size of its economy, or how much territory it controls. It’s also measured by the richness of its culture.”

And, Obama said, “If you want to understand America, then you better read some Walt Whitman. If you want to understand America, you need to know Langston Hughes.”

The Library of Congress website has a Presidents as Poets area with information on eight presidents who wrote poetry at some point in their lives, starting with George Washington’s “anguished love poems,” through Obama. Obama had two poems published in the literary magazine at Occidental College when he was an undergraduate.

Asked by The New Yorker in 2007 to evaluate Obama’s work, the estimable Yale literary critic Harold Bloom said one poem was “not bad – a good enough folk poem with some pathos and humor and affection.”

Bloom was less charitable toward published poet Jimmy Carter, calling him, “literally the worst poet in the United States.”

In his 1956 commencement speech, JFK told a story about an English mother who wrote her son’s school: “Don’t teach my boy poetry; he is going to stand for Parliament.”

“Well, perhaps she was right,” Kennedy said, “but if more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place to live.”

I agree, but we need not wait for the politicians. April 21 is Poem in Your Pocket Day, when people find a poem they love and carry it with them to share. What’s yours?

©2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Common sense plentiful -- and so rare -- July 31, 2014 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Common sense is the mantra of the moment in the nation’s capital.

The other day, Republican House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio accused Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada of “making a deceitful and cynical attempt to derail the House’s common-sense solution” on dealing with the border crisis.

Almost every group from President Obama and proponents of gun control to those who think fast-food restaurants shouldn’t have to list their calorie counts seek support by appealing to “common sense.”  

But as members of Congress -- Democrat or Republican – present their legislative proposals as common sense, likely as not an opposing Republican or Democrat quickly will warn that the proposal is anything but.

Common sense is something we used to assume all Americans have. Since Thomas Paine published his famous “Common Sense” pamphlet in January 1776 and sparked a revolution, we’ve been enamored of plain talk and level-headedness.

That paragon of American inventiveness Thomas Alva Edison said the three great essentials to achieving anything worthwhile are, first, hard work; second, stick-to-itiveness; third, common sense.

Last Wednesday, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, D-Miss., and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., introduced a bill to “restore common sense to the classification and security system.”

Most people didn’t know that more than 5 million people hold security clearances and that the system is cumbersome, costly and potentially intrusive. Call in common sense reform!

In 2010, the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) introduced the first new rules in nearly 40 years for heavy equipment operators. The White House called the rules a “common sense approach to cranes, derricks and the safety of American construction workers.” After complaints, OSHA later agreed to delay the certification period for operators until 2017.

Many people thought that the time for “common sense” gun control had come after the school massacre in Newtown, Conn., in 2012. And yet, the proposal to require background checks for all gun sales has languished on Capitol Hill. 

On July 10 in Austin, Tex., President Obama reviewed his campaign-year agenda -- reforming immigration policy, expanding early-childhood education and launching bridge and highway construction projects. 

“They are commonsense things,” he said. “They’re not that radical. We know it’s what we should be doing. And what drives me nuts – and I know drives you nuts – is Washington isn’t doing it.”

The president put his finger on something. Just because you tie your idea to the wings of the bird of common sense doesn’t mean it will fly. Most so-called common sense proposals never get off the ground.

Which brings us to one word that’s rarely mentioned in connection with common sense: compromise. Most people would agree that compromise is part of common sense, but it’s in short supply in the capital. 

 Perhaps we all should take a lesson from Andre Davis, senior judge in the 4^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond. wrote

The court upheld in the July 22 King v. Burwell decision tax credit subsidies for people who buy health insurance on federally-run health exchanges through the Affordable Care Act. At issue: whether Congress had intended to limit subsidies to people in states that ran their own exchanges, excluding states where the exchanges are run by the federal government.

Davis wrote in his concurring opinion:

“If I ask for pizza from Pizza Hut for lunch but clarify that I would be fine with a pizza from Domino’s, and I then specify that I want ham and pepperoni on my pizza from Pizza Hut, (and) my friend who returns from Domino’s with a ham and pepperoni pizza (she) has still complied with a literal construction of my lunch order.

 “That is this case.”

There’s common sense in action.

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©2014 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

It's time to stop demonizing food stamps -- May 19, 2011 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Trying to save his presidential campaign, Newt Gingrich recanted his sharp critique of the House Republican budget plan for Medicare.

But he hasn’t backed off calling President Barack Obama “the most successful food stamp president in American history.”

Obama can take care of himself in name-calling contests. Gingrich, however, is really disparaging people who have to rely on food stamps to put dinner on the table, and they don’t have a soapbox. Yes, Ronald Reagan used food stamp recipients and welfare queens to make political points, but, hello, Newt, it’s not 1976.

Gingrich may think he’s the smartest man in any room, but running a 20th century campaign in the 21st century?

Today, about 44.2 million Americans receive food stamps -- not the 47 million Gingrich said last Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” That’s one in seven of us – and not one in six, as Gingrich said. But let’s not quibble. Gingrich is correct that the food stamp rolls are at a record high. Something he didn’t mention: Nearly 80 percent of benefits go to households with children.

The former House speaker blames Obama and the Democrats for the explosive growth in participation, although tough economic times always result in spikes in food stamp usage. Changes enacted over President George W. Bush’s veto expanded eligibility for food stamps and formally renamed the program the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Also removing some of the stigma, recipients now use electronic cards to buy groceries.

Still, many Americans who are eligible don’t receive food assistance. The Agriculture Department estimates that one in three eligible people go unserved.

On the other hand, it bolsters critics when loony loopholes allow people to game the system, such as the $2 million lottery winner in Michigan in the news this week. Fortunately, such cases are rare.

During the 2010 congressional campaign, Gingrich urged Republicans to be the party of paychecks in contrast to Democrats, whom he called the party of food stamps. His construct ignores the bipartisan support food stamps enjoyed over the years. It suggests that Democrats prefer to put people on the dole than in jobs, which is an absurd and old-fashioned idea.

As for Gingrich, he fails to see how arrogant it is for someone with champagne tastes and a beer budget to tell the needy to tighten their belts. Politico reported that in 2005 and 2006 Gingrich owed Tiffany’s up to $500,000 on a revolving charge.

He may think he’s following in Reagan’s footsteps. In 1976, the former governor of California told a crowd in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., that working people were rightly outraged when they stand in grocery lines behind “a strapping young buck” who is buying T-bone steaks with food stamps.

Such racially charged language was unacceptable even then, but historian Dan T. Carter gives Reagan the benefit of the doubt, saying the phrase was an embarrassing “slip of the tongue” that Reagan never repeated. At the time, Reagan was trying to take the GOP presidential nomination from the more centrist Gerald Ford.

Carter is author of the 1996 book, “From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution 1963 to 1994.” He notes that in the 1990s, Gingrich dismissed criticism that his demonization of welfare mothers was racially motivated.

Gingrich’s Contract with America in 1994 called for eliminating food stamps as an entitlement and turning the program into block grants to states. The current House budget plan would do just that – and cut the SNAP budget by $127 billion between 2012and 2021. The budget is dead in the Senate.

Sunday, on “Meet the Press,” Gingrich hotly denied that calling Obama the “food stamp president” was racist.

Host David Gregory showed a clip of Gingrich, a former congressman from Georgia, telling Georgia Republicans as he kicked off his presidential bid, “You want to be a country that creates food stamps, in which case frankly Obama’s an enormous success. Or do you want to be a country that creates paychecks?”

Gregory asked Gingrich if the remark had racial content.

“Oh, come on, David!” Gingrich remonstrated.

“What did you mean?” Gregory persisted. “What was the point?”

“That’s bizarre,” Gingrich objected. Obama should be held accountable for the increase in the food stamp rolls, he said.

But calling Obama the “food stamp president”? That’s so last century.

© 2011 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.