If I declare myself to be Emperor of the United States, it’s safe to say not much would come of it. Just because I say I’m in charge doesn’t mean I’m actually in charge. To be in charge, you have to have people willing to follow you, and I don’t have a lot of people who want to be my minions.

(Yes, I know I wouldn’t be the first Emperor of the United States. God rest Emperor Norton.)

For better or worse, American Democracy works the same way. The 537 elected federal office holders do not run this country through some sort of magical compulsion. They run this country because millions of people believe they do, and are willing to continue to let them. There is nothing special about Donald Trump that makes him any more qualified to be President of the United States than I am qualified to be Emperor of the United States. The reason he’s President and I’m not Emperor is because millions of people believe that he is, and no one believes that I am.

That’s why I’m not comforted by words like this from an anonymous Trump administration insider:

It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.

This is not a good sign.

To be clear, I want much of Trump’s agenda to be defeated. To the extent that he has policies, I think many of them will be very bad for this country. And even where I might agree with some of his policies, I don’t trust him to actually implement them in a competent manner, because my biggest problem with Trump is the same problem the anonymous op-ed author identifies:

The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.

From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.

Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.

The erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren’t for unsung heroes in and around the White House.

Yeah…no.

I don’t want to get off into a deep state conspiracy here. This is not some persistent class of high-level bureaucrats who run the government their own way regardless of who is in office. The people described in the op-ed were all brought in with the Trump Administration, and they will leave with the Trump administration.

Good riddance to the lot of them.

Someone at @Popehat (no idea which one) pointed out that Andrew Burstein at Salon is calling for a new constitutional convention. I’m generally against the idea, because although I can think of a few things I’d like to change, I’d be worried that we’d lose way too many freedoms if we rewrote the Constitution in this fearful day and age. Burstein’s article is an excellent example of what I’m worried about.

To start with, I’ve got to wonder if the author has ever read the Constitution or thought about what the Constitution is for, because he really takes the discussion down into the weeds. A few examples:

“Bring the best teachers to the worst schools, and pay a hefty premium to those teachers. Make a commitment to fixing these schools first. Let them shine on the outside, as a site for community pride. Give them great equipment and smaller classes. Make the learning environment of the poor superior. Take pride in actual democratic commitment. […] While we’re at it, unless they can be seriously monitored, and we mean seriously, let’s move away from the concept of for-profit charter schools, for-profit universities and for-profit prisons. They have already proven themselves unusually subject to private greed and corruption.”

“Start teaching foreign languages in first or second grade.”

“SAT and GRE scores do not measure imagination. Also, reinforce what teachers do by adding counselors and school psychologists to our school systems.”

“Protect Social Security by increasing the Social Security tax rate of those who earn over a certain amount (say, $300,000) in a given year. Close tax loopholes that continue to protect industries that otherwise feel no compulsion to collaborate with others for social betterment: they should not be bullied, just equitably taxed.”

“Instead of rewarding oil and coal interests with government subsidies, accord them the same treatment government has given to Big Tobacco for a whole generation, which has dramatically reduced the percentage of Americans who smoke. Just as no one objects to highway signs that read “Buckle Up,” would it hurt to see warning labels at the gas pump?”

I realize that Andrew Burstein is a college professor, so education must undoubtedly loom large as an issue, but what the hell is he doing talking about SAT and GRE scores in the Constitution? The whole article is really just an exercise in “If I ruled the world…”

That’s not to say Burstein wouldn’t make some Constitution-level changes if he ruled the world. Among those I was able to identify are

1. gutting free speech
2. slavery

Let’s take that second one first. He doesn’t want to bring back race-based chattel slavery (so…good for him), but he does want to force young people to work against their will:

Our 18-year-olds are hyperactive online but, for the most part, socially immature. They learn how to party in college, while generally failing to complete reading assignments. The new Constitution would institute a two-year national service commitment, allowing students to obtain college admission at the end of high school–deferred acceptance. They would have the security of a spot waiting for them in college, but would in the meantime take a deliberate part in expansive national service programs.

I don’t know what I hate more, the fact that he wants compulsory national service, or the fact his only justification is that college students are immature and party too much. Because that’s not a reason to steal two years of their lives to work on projects like this:

A math whiz from Vermont can teach high school kids in Zuni, New Mexico. A senior who loves environmental history might work for the Park Service or on an experimental farm. For some, it will be the armed forces. Develop pride, develop useful skills. Energize young citizens–remember, they can vote at 18. Get businesses involved, partnering with government. Teach real-life communication skills, with a dose of empathy. Don’t coddle, but compensate the young men and women for their service. Even those who don’t intend to go to college will profit from such an introduction to a varied, more interesting life.

I have no objection to getting people to teach math or work on an experimental farm, although I’m pretty sure we could get them to do so freely if we just paid them enough. And what exactly will be the process for matching people to their national service jobs? I wonder if Burstein is picturing some wise and kindly government expert poring over Johnny’s class records and carefully picking out a job that will be just right for him. Because that’s the kind of subtle personalized service we all expect from government bureaucrats, right?

I also can’t help wondering about those poor inner-city kids — minorities, most likely — who are stuck in crappy schools and who therefore never get a chance to be math wizards or environmental history geeks. I suppose there’s always the armed forces — which will no doubt be super pleasant to serve in once nobody has a choice — but what about those who don’t qualify? I notice Burstein mentions getting businesses involved. What’s he got in mind? Coal mining? Garment work? Commercial fishing? Or perhaps some nice farming conglomerate could snap up the cheap labor for harvest season. Is picking cotton still labor intensive?

(I suppose that if I had to teach a bunch of snotty college students, I’d fantasize about sending them all off to a couple of years of conscript labor too. On the other hand, I’ll bet Burstein’s teachers felt the same way about him, but a quick glance at his biography doesn’t indicate any military service or the Peace Corps or anything like that. Just fifteen years on Wall Street followed by a job in academia. Perhaps he feels that his university teaching is service enough, unlike the rest of us with our less-exalted jobs.)

As for gutting free speech, that’s because Burstein is really pissed off about the Citizens United ruling:

This is the thing. We all know the solution to our sorest problem. Let’s spell out what everyone’s saying, but voters, en masse, have failed to press for hard enough. It’s all the friggin’ campaign contributions. No more fundraising. Period.

[…]

Use tax dollars exclusively to fund national political campaigns. As students of history, the framers of our Constitution understood the classical meaning of the terms “republic” and “democracy.” Individually and collectively, they would have had a single word for Citizens United: CORRUPTION. Institutionalized corruption. Despite its contrived explanation, the 2010 Supreme Court decision is not about free speech; all it endorses is the thug’s motto: “Money talks.”

(Impressive use of ALL CAPS, dude. You almost had me convinced! Next time, try adding exclamation marks!!!)

Does he even know what Citizens United was about? A group of people operating a non-profit corporation made a documentary that was critical of a candidate for public office and the Federal Election Commission got a court to order them not to show it on television or even to advertise it, basically on the grounds that the expense of showing it was equivalent to to donating money to the candidate’s opponents. The Supreme Court ruled that prohibiting them from showing it violated their free speech rights, implicitly concluding that people don’t lose that right just because they happen to be organized as a corporation.

I honestly have no clue why Burstein says “money talks” is the “thug’s motto.” Thugs don’t talk to you, they hurt you. Yet Burstein apparently thinks that it’s evil for corporations to spend money to talk to people. Because that’s all that he and everyone else are upset about: Corporations talking to people.

(I guess he could be arguing that by spending money on behalf of a politician’s election campaign, corporations are essentially bribing politicians, but I have no clue what bribery has to do with thuggery either.)

Remove money from politics and ideas flourish. One hundred percent public funding, and a designated campaign season extending months, not years. It can be done, people. They don’t know it now, but even the politician class will be glad for it. Do you think they live for the Iowa caucuses? Oblige them to spend more time studying and legislating and less time posturing.

You bet your ass the politician class will be happy for it. Challengers and critics won’t be pointing out their faults and criticizing their policies if the incumbent politicians withhold funding. And not only does Burstein want to prevent people from talking about politics immediately before an election (as the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act did before Citizens United invalidated it), he also wants to prohibit people from talking about politics at any other time as well.

And unlike the corporate “thugs” he’s so concerned about, the thugs silencing free speech in the name of campaign finance laws won’t just talk to people: They’ll send men with guns to lock them in cages and take all their stuff.

Lest you think I’m making too much of his opposition to Citizens United, he also wants to suppress other kinds of free speech as well:

Make those crass [oil company] ads go away–take the one where the caring female executive of BP Alaska boasts of how the insufficiently regulated corporation responsible for the Deepwater Horizon disaster loves people and creates jobs and works for America. You shouldn’t be able to put a compassionate face on corporate greed. Let’s get priorities straight: Instead of permitting them to twist facts, make polluters pay for TV ads that aggressively promote a clean-energy economy.

[…]

And is there some way to free the airwaves from the pestilential noise generated by those ideologues who shout ignorantly about getting government off their backs?

Yeah, won’t those guys feel stupid for having whined about something as minor as Obamacare when the new government starts taking their children away on their 18th birthday. That will teach them.

I gotta say, there’s more than just a tinge of fascism in all this.

What promise lies in the business of getting ahead at all costs? Or in the unmitigated voyeurism prompted by a mass culture daily saturated with news of mass shootings and manufactured celebrities’ mostly bare bodies? The bizarre and banal loom before our eyes and almost appear to outweigh what matters. […] We should think large.

You know who else thought large? Hitler.

Yeah, I went there. Sorry. The “You know who else…?” meme is just a joke, but this “national greatness” bullshit is not just a right-wing obsession anymore, and it pisses me off. I have grown to despise would-be leaders who belittle the concerns and culture of ordinary people while trying to enlist us in whatever bullshit they believe is more important than our petty selfish desire to enjoy our lives.

Clearly, Burstein is not a genocidal monster. But he does want to enslave millions, and he wants to silence and imprison those who speak out without approval. That makes him some kind of monster.

To contend with those who have been conditioned to fear “big government,” here’s the winning response: Let us profit from good government ideas once they are put into practice. Government performed a masterstroke at the end of World War II with the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944–you know it as the GI Bill–enabling millions of veterans to go to college and better themselves. It’s proof that government can make a positive difference in citizens’ lives.

Perhaps. But while you’re talking about the 1940s, let’s not overlook the 60 million people who never had a chance to better themselves because they died in World War II. That too is a difference made by government.

Radley Balko finally published the story he was working on in St. Louis County. It’s an amazing piece of work, detailing numerous examples of the abusive relationship between the suburban communities and their residents.

When the officer showed up, Bolden filled with dread.

“He was really nice and polite at first,” Bolden says. “But once he ran my name, he got real mean with me. He told me I was going to jail. I had my 3-year-old and my one-and-a-half-year-old with me. I asked him about my kids. He said I had better find someone to come and get them, because he was taking me in.” The Florissant officer arrested and cuffed Bolden in front of her children. Her kids remained with another officer until Bolden’s mother and sister could come pick them up.

The officer found that Bolden had four arrest warrants in three separate jurisdictions: the towns of Florissant and Hazelwood in St. Louis County and the town of Foristell in St. Charles County. All of the warrants were for failure to appear in court for traffic violations. Bolden hadn’t appeared in court because she didn’t have the money. A couple of those fines were for speeding, one was for failure to wear her seatbelt and most of the rest were for what defense attorneys in the St. Louis area have come to call “poverty violations” — driving with a suspended license, expired plates, expired registration and a failure to provide proof of insurance.

It may sound like this woman is just a scofflaw — four warrants, for Pete’s sake — but as Radley reveals, the small towns that make up suburban St. Louis County are operated in a way that deliberately creates that kind of situation. Police are constantly on the lookout for new reasons to issue citations, and the system is rigged to encourage mistakes, leading to more citations and more warrants. Some towns have more outstanding warrants than they have citizens. All in the interest of earning money from fines.

Some of the towns in St. Louis County can derive 40 percent or more of their annual revenue from the petty fines and fees collected by their municipal courts. A majority of these fines are for traffic offenses, but they can also include fines for fare-hopping on MetroLink (St. Louis’s light rail system), loud music and other noise ordinance violations, zoning violations for uncut grass or unkempt property, violations of occupancy permit restrictions, trespassing, wearing “saggy pants,” business license violations and vague infractions such as “disturbing the peace” or “affray” that give police officers a great deal of discretion to look for other violations.

Radley tells a number of stories of how this system treats the residents. None of the stories are too horrible — people spend a few weeks in jail at the worst — but when multiplied by tens of thousands of warrants resulting from probably a couple of hundred thousand traffic tickets and minor violations, it’s an ugly story. It’s not quite the encomienda used to essentially enslave the indigenous people of South America, but Radley still paints a picture of an extractive economy in which productive people, mostly black, are preyed upon by an elite ruling caste consisting of city managers, police, lawyers, and judges.

When the protests first started in Ferguson after the shooting death of Michael Brown, a lot of people (including me) wondered why this particular death was the one that triggered a response. Why did the residents of Ferguson choose this moment to protest the police? Why were they angry enough to take to the streets this time? Why all the speeches and national attention?

I still don’t have an answer to those questions, but in light of Radley Balko’s story about what’s going on in St. Louis county, I think a better question is why would the people of Ferguson ever stop protesting? Given what’s been going on, they have every right to be very angry.

Look, I don’t want to be accused of moral relativism here. Of course the looting and arson were crimes. But those crimes were nothing compared to scale of outright thievery masquerading as government that the people of St. Louis County have been putting up with for years. There may have been a few dozen criminals among the protesters, but there are hundreds of criminals wearing badges and sitting in government offices.

Coming soon, to a WikiLeaks mirror site near you…SaltBarnGate:

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit against the state after it refused to release the construction plans for a barn used to store road salt, on the basis that doing so would be a security risk.

…

According to the complaint, [Carole] Chiaffarano suspected that the salt barn was built “according to plans that were not approved by one or more governmental agencies.”

Chiaffarano, whose property is located 38 feet from the barn, had no difficulty in obtaining the plans from Bethlehem Township after filing an OPRA request. She wanted to compare the building plans provided by the township to those on file with the state.

Chiaffarano filed an OPRA request for the state’s building plans, but was denied her request as the state cited a 2002 executive order by Gov. James McGreevey.

The order, issued in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, allows the state to decline the release of public records that would compromise the state’s ability to “protect and defend the state and its citizens against acts of sabotage or terrorism.”

I think it’s entirely possible that the salt barn is actually listed as a critical infrastructure component in New Jersey on the grounds that a terrorist act could make it inaccessible during a snowstorm, leading to impassible roads that impair emergency response vehicles and damage the local economy by disrupting travel. The chance of this being the explanation is directly proportional to the amount of money New Jersey can get from federal anti-terrorosm funds by claiming critical infrastructure status for a barn full of road salt.

The other possibility is that some state bureaucrat was sick and tired of handling Open Public Records Act requests and figured that he or she could avoid the tedium of finding, copying, and mailing a set of blueprints by invoking the anti-terrorism exception to the public records law. After all, it wasn’t anybody important asking for the blueprints, just a citizen.

(Hat tip: Bruce Schneier)