Mountain Views News, Combined Edition Saturday, February 13, 2021

12

OPINION

Mountain View News Saturday, February 13, 2021 


MOUNTAIN 
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STUART TOLCHIN

WHAT CAN BE DONE WHEN THE 
RULERS DO NOT FOLLOW THE 
RULES? 

 

For most of recorded human history the question did not 
exist. Rules were made by rulers who often claimed divine 
authority and instituted practices of controlled conformity 
to maintain their power. American Revolutionaries 
desired something else. They were willing to risk their 
lives to create a new kind of government which would be 
responsible to the People rather than to the will of some 
distant king. This desire would result in a set of written 
laws, a Constitution, which would precisely describe limits on the ruling leaders who 
would be popularly elected by individuals. Of course, in order to protect themselves 
from abuses of power individual voters had to first be presented with the truth and 
remain focused on what they believed to be right.

 This new Constitution described powers which would be granted to someone 
expected to execute the powers of his office by presiding over the Government. The 
founders, perhaps, distrustful of their own creation, wisely determined that it was 
necessary to limit the powers of this Executive by creating two other coequal branches 
of government, the Legislative and the Judicial. Power of the Legislative Branch 
which would be more directly responsible to the voters was further limited by the 
creation of two separate Congressional Bodies. One body composed of two separate 
Houses which together would have to cooperate to pass laws later to be executed by 
the President. A third branch, the Judiciary, was created to be a kind of watchdog to 
insure that the laws created and executed were in harmony with the Constitution. 

 Representatives of individual States concerned about the rights of individuals 
and the rights of minorities demanded that an additional Bill of Rights be created as 
amendments to the Constitution. The very first amendment was a guarantee that this 
newly formed government would have no power to inhibit a person’s right to free 
speech, freedom to exercise religion, freedom of the press and freedom of association. 
Subsequent amendments protected individuals rights described as due process of law. 
(Originally these rights stood as protections against only Federal legislation but later 
were incorporated as protections against individual State action by the fourteenth 
amendment to the U.S. Constitution enacted during the Civil War.) 

 This wonderful experiment which included the voluntary relinquishment of power by 
a non-re-elected or retiring President was historically unique. Well how has it worked 
out? Was what was created only an elected American King, another potential tyrant, 
who would never voluntary relinquish power? Historians agree that the American 
system requiring the voluntary relinquishment of power perhaps survived largely 
because our first President, good old, heirless George Washington, voluntarily chose 
not to run for reelection and a peaceful new election now took place. For the next two 
hundred and twenty years potential candidates competed by promising to meet the 
needs of the electorate who had the responsibility to closely observe the candidates in 
order protect their own interests and ideals. 

Alas, over the years it has become increasingly difficult for individuals to have a clear 
perception of their own interests. A Supreme Court ruling in the case of Citizens 
United v. Federal Elections Commission has held that corporations could not be 
restricted in the right to make campaign contributions. This decision has allowed a 
small group of wealthy donors and special interests to obscure the truth and to make 
money the source of political power. Along came Social Media which allowed a skilled 
communicator such as our ex-President to utilize that money to obscure reality and 
to almost destroy our intended democracy. If we do not wish to return to the rule of 
Kings and/or tyrants our only hope is the protection of TRUTH. Money must be taken 
out of politics period! In addition huge severe punitive penalties for governmental lies 
must be enacted and rigorously enforced. If we all have the opportunity to be presented 
with the truth then we all have the responsibility to adhere to the Shakespearian 
quotation “This above all: to thine own self be true”. I believe that is what is best for 
the individual and what is best for the world! 


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LEFT, RIGHT OR CENTER! 

TRUMP’S IMPEACHMENT LAWYER 
WAS NOT PHILLY’S FINEST

DICK POLMAN

CHRISTINE FLOWERS


WHY MARJORIE TAYLOR 
GREENE NEEDS TO BE SHUNNED

Remember back when you were a kid and you were up against a term 
paper deadline, so you just decided to wing it with swollen prose like 
“The Civil War has been a big important issue for years and years all 
across the many states of America”?

On day one of the impeachment trial, that was Bruce Castor – the 
latest entry in the MAGA annals of ineptitude.

Look, I can muster an ounce of sympathy for the ex-DA from the 
Philadelphia suburbs. There’s no way at this point that any top-tier attorney will work 
for the Mar-a-Lago mobster, so naturally it’s going to be a guy who whiffed on Bill Cosby 
signing on at the 11th hour and lurching through the English language like a drunken 
sailor.

Granted, if Castor had simply chosen to mimic the Jan. 6 mob by smearing his own poop 
in the hallowed hall, most Republican senators would’ve still stood firm in their determination 
to give Trump a pass. But if the ultimate aim was to sway some Americans in 
the court of public opinion, suffice it to say that Castor was no Atticus Finch.

For instance, Castor said: “President Trump is no longer is in office. The object of the 
Constitution has been achieved. He was removed by the voters.” Oops! Trump’s whole 
shtick, the core of his Big Lie, is that he wasn’t removed, and that, quite the contrary, he 
won in a landslide. That’s why he incited the rabble in the first place.

Castor also had no clue what impeachment was all about: “If my colleagues on this side 
of the chamber actually think that President Trump committed a criminal offense, and 
let’s understand, a high crime is a felony, and a misdemeanor is a misdemeanor. The 
words haven’t changed that much over time.”

Um, try again, counselor. “High crimes and misdemeanors” are not necessarily offenses 
as defined in our criminal statutes. As Alexander Hamilton pointed out in the Federalist 
Papers, the term refers to flagrant breaches of political power – offenses that “proceed 
from…the abuse or violation of some public trust.”

On the other hand, some of what Castor said was indisputably true. For instance, this 
profundity: “If the individual state legislatures didn’t adopt the Constitution, we would 
not have it.” And if the sun hadn’t risen this morning, we wouldn’t have daylight.

But, alas, all too often there was a clarity deficit. For instance: “I saw a headline, ‘Representative 
so and so seeks to walk back comments about,’ I forget what it was, something 
that bothered her.” It’s hard to say where Castor was going with that, because he never 
arrived at his destination.

I’ll leave it to you, dear reader, to decipher this riff, because I give up:

“Remember, the founders recognized that the argument that I started with, that political 
pressure is driven by the need for immediate action, because something under contemporary 
community standards really horrific happened, and the people represented by 
the members of the United States House of Representatives become incensed. And what 
do you do with a federal issue if you’re back in suburban Philadelphia and something 
happens that makes the people who live there incensed? You call your congressman. 
And your congressmen, elected every two years with their pulse on the people of their 
district, 750,000 people, they respond, and boy do they respond to you. The congressman 
calls you back. A staffer calls you back. You get all the information that they have 
on the issue. Sometimes you even get invited to submit a language that would improve 
whatever the issue is.”

Remember that grade-school term paper you probably winged back in the day? That last 
sentence sounds like something I might well have written.

Anyway, it was bad enough that Castor kept name-checking his buddy bond with Sen. 
Pat Toomey. I doubt that pleased his exiled client, who’s undoubtedly aware that Toomey 
has publicly called out the fascist action of Jan. 6 for what it was. But what surely must’ve 
incensed Trump most of all was his praise for the House impeachment managers’ presentation, 
correctly calling it “well done” and “outstanding.”

But that’s because the impeachment managers came armed with the facts and the law. It 
falls to the likes of Bruce Castor to work with nothing, and make it sound even worse.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia

The worst thing to happen in my lifetime was the massacre 
of 20 children almost a decade ago. The current 
controversy of the Capitol riots, the Antifa uprisings this 
summer, the Oklahoma City bombing and even 9/11 
don’t carry that same, crushing weight. The other tragedies 
were political reckonings, making us face the terror 
within, and without.

But Sandy Hook was what happened when we thought there was a bottom, a 
basement, a level beyond which we could not sink – and then the floor crumbled. 
Disappeared. Evaporated like the tears of children when comforted by their parents. 
Anyone who denies that it happened, who mocks the pain of parents is a 
vile creature that deserves to be shunned.

But a creature like that sits in Congress, and her name is Marjorie Taylor Greene. 
There is strong, credible evidence that she denied that Newtown ever occurred. 
She denied that babies lie in graves. She suggested that it was a conspiracy to take 
our guns from us, and thwart the mandate of the Second Amendment. She did 
that, and she sits, lawfully, in Congress.

One single representative can neither elevate or destroy the House. Alexandria 
Ocasio Cortez is a lightning rod for anger from the right, but she is just a very 
young woman with exceptional skills at self-promotion and a huge cult following. 
Rashida Tlaib shows anti-Semitism with every sneered attack against Israel, but 
she is also just one person among many.

But Marjorie Taylor Greene is different for me, because of Newtown.

I honestly don’t care that she made fun of David Hogg, a young man who became 
expert at an early age at dealing with his critics. He gave as good as he ever got, 
despite the fawning concern from cable hosts, as in “Greene harrassed this child!” 
He is now poised to challenged Mike Lindell as the next Pillow King. Excuse me 
if I don’t feel bad for his bruised feelings.

And while her sometime devotion to QAnon is bizarre, considering the group’s 
participation in the Capitol riots, the majority of people who believe in crazy 
stuff don’t do crazy things. Tom Cruise is a Scientologist, which by every metric 
known to worshipers is crazy, and I don’t think he’s ready to take up arms against 
the government. Qanon is bad, but generally, the First Amendment protects crazy 
beliefs as long as they remain trapped safely in the mind.

But the thing you cannot sanction, or ignore, is the willingness to suggest that 
dead children are figments of a politician’s imagination. Greene has backtracked 
and even tried to deny that she said Newtown was a myth. Too little, too late. 
When even the Sandy Hook Promise founders, parents who lost their beautiful 
angels on that tragic December day, are convinced that she said it and have condemned 
her, we have no choice but to accept the fact that Greene swallowed the 
Alex Jones Kool Aid.

No one should be defending her. That there are some Republicans who are, in 
fact, doing so is abhorrent. That they allegedly gave her a standing ovation in 
secret committee is repellent. That they themselves refused to strip her of committee 
positions is almost incomprehensible. I say “almost,” because I know what 
it’s like to feel as if the world is coming for you, and you need to fight back. The 
GOP has circled the wagons around this freshman congresswoman because of 
the attacks against the party in general from both Democrats, their allies in the 
media, and some disaffected members of their own party. Fight or flee are the 
responses people have when assaulted, and they have decided to fight. In many 
ways, I can’t blame them.

But there are limits to self-defense, and when they cause you to lose your soul, 
you have to stop. Any woman who has been credibly accused of slandering dead 
children and their parents does not deserve to be in a position of authority. It is 
ultimately up to the voters to cast her out, just as I hope the same is done with the 
toxic sisters on the left. But while she is in Congress, her voice, a voice that was 
raised in support of devilish and indecent conspiracy, must be muted.

I am only saddened that it took the Democrats to do the heavy moral lifting. But 
when faced with dead babies, political considerations should evaporate as quickly 
as the tears on my keyboard.

 Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times


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