Old newspaper clippings provide reminders

This post was first published in the Wilson Times July 27, 2019.

My wife and I have been going through boxes and throwing away things that we once thought we’d like to keep forever, or at least a year. Among these boxes are several boxes I brought home from my career as a newspaper editor, going back to 1975. In 34 years as a newspaper editor, I wrote something like 1,700 columns and close to 9,000 editorials.

These are not exact numbers, just approximations of the number of editions the newspapers I edited had published and my usual writing schedule. I’m sure I took some days off (but I often wrote editorials and columns in advance so as not to burden someone else with having to do my work while I was away).

My wife suggested that I should save the columns and other items that dealt with our children and our home life, so that our children might recall their younger days. Two of our children were born while I worked for newspapers. Our youngest child was 29, the oldest 37, when my newspaper career ended. My wife thought compiling these personal memories in some printed form, such as a book, would be an excellent gift to our children.

So I’ve been pulling musty clippings of columns from dusty file folders and deciding whether my topics were anything our children would care about. The jury is still out on that question. Whether anyone else ever reads these articles, my tedious exercise in separating wheat from chaff has been eye-opening to me.

I discovered I wrote a good number of columns of a personal matter, such as the surprising joy of seeing our children learn to read, learn to drive a car (scary!), welcoming children into “adult” conversations, seeing children move out of the house and become independent (sort of), and so on. I tried to write columns that were not strictly personal but would find an audience with people who could identify with my experiences. Comments from friends and strangers indicate that some of those columns resonated with other families.

In my review process, I discovered that I often used my columns to explain newspaper issues to our readers. As editor, I was the final arbiter of what news went into the paper. I wrote about how we made news decisions (a daily meeting of editors discussed the importance of our available news articles). I wrote about anonymous callers and letter writers who would criticize or threaten me and the newspaper, often because they didn’t understand what we were trying to do, and sometimes because they just had their facts flat wrong.

Good example: An angry woman called to say I was a racist because we didn’t run an appropriate photo of the new Miss America because she was black. I told her I was sure no racial discrimination was involved in Miss America coverage, but she insisted that we ran a large photo of white Miss America on the front page in color but ran a small, black and white photo of the black Miss America a year later. I told her I honestly couldn’t remember how we ran the previous year’s photo but I would check. I flipped through the bound volume of newspapers and found out the caller had it all wrong. We had run a two-column photo of the black Miss America, the same size as the white Miss America got. Both photos were in color.

She wouldn’t give me her name or phone number, so I couldn’t prove to her that she was wrong. I had to settle for writing a polite column, which she probably didn’t read. But I got it off my chest.

When the newspaper changed its policy and began endorsing political candidates, I wrote many columns explaining the decision and reminding readers that an endorsement is just one entity’s opinion. Other opinions are valid and can be published in the paper as guest columns or letters to the editor.

I’ve also gone through about 30 years of calendars I had kept as editor and as a nonprofit manager. They brought back a few memories, but mostly they proved that I couldn’t read my own scribbling done while hurriedly writing down an event or appointment. No point in keeping any of those calendars. At first, I was disappointed that I had made no notation when my parents died, my siblings died, my children married, and other life events occurred.

Then I realized these were calendars — appointment reminders — not diaries. No need to keep any old calendars.

What amendment would you add to Constitution?

This post was first published in the Wilson Times July 20.

In the fall issue of Trend and Tradition magazine, Mitchell Reiss, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s president and CEO, challenged readers to suggest changes to the U.S. Constitution — amendments to repeal or alter or new amendments to add. The summer issue of the Colonial Williamsburg magazine published several of the suggestions and put other submissions online at https://www.colonialwilliamsburg.com/learn/trend-and-tradition-magazine/trend-and-tradition-summer-2019/constitution-comments.

I took the invitation as a challenge and suggested that a new amendment make it clear that corporations are not “people” and should not be accorded rights intended for individuals. A couple of other respondents offered the same suggestion, citing court cases to back up their contention. One 1886 Supreme Court case determined the Union Pacific Railroad to be entitled to the same rights as a person. More recent campaign finance cases have affirmed corporations’ right to constitutional rights.

As you might guess, several people wanted to get rid of the Electoral College; others wanted to mandate a balanced federal budget. Revisions to the Second Amendment to clarify what is meant by a “well-regulated militia” and “right to keep and bear arms” also were suggested. Some respondents wanted an amendment to address gerrymandering of voting districts.

About a fourth of the respondents wanted term limits for federal offices, including Congress and the Supreme Court. One response suggested an age limit rather than a term limit for some offices.

A few wanted to repeal the 26^th Amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18. The 1971 amendment passed in part because men were being drafted into military service at age 18 but could not vote. A rallying cry held that if you’re old enough to die for your country you should be able to vote in its elections. That amendment has not had a great impact on elections because young people have not been frequent voters. On sober reflection, many people see the younger generation as not interested in serious issues and not mature enough to shape policy. One writer suggested a voting age of 25 or 30, except all military personnel would be eligible to vote.

One proposal I had not expected to see was repeal of the 17^th Amendment, which in 1913 moved the election of senators from state legislatures to the ballot box, choosing senators by popular vote. Only those with an interest in history know that senators were elected by state legislatures for the Constitution’s first 122 years until populists prevailed upon Congress and the states to make election to the Senate the same process as election to the House. The Constitution originally made the Senate representative of the states, which were considered sovereign, while the House represented individuals. The 17^th Amendment upset that balance and made the states nearly superfluous in Congress. Repealing the 17th Amendment, advocates say, would make states relevant again.

My suggestion about distinguishing individuals from corporations is just as arcane as the 17^th Amendment. I selected the corporation issue because it seemed to be the only way to limit big money influence in elections without impinging on individuals’ freedom of speech, press and assembly. Courts have declared that money is a form of speech, so spending cannot be proscribed by legislation. But corporate money can overwhelm individual donations and elect candidates beholden only to big business. The “due process” and “equal protection” clauses of the 14^th Amendment, which were intended to ensure the rights of former slaves, should never have been extended to corporations by judicial decree. A new amendment is needed to correct this and to avoid more “Citizens United” decisions that allow corporations to claim rights intended for individual citizens.

The proposals submitted to Colonial Williamsburg were varied and thoughtful. These included such ideas as electing the Supreme Court or appointing the justices for only 10-year terms. Immigration caught several peoples’ attention. One wanted a revision to eliminate the “anchor baby” concept of making anyone born here a citizen immediately, leading to preferred immigrant status for family members. One suggestion: Make persons born here citizens only after one parent becomes a U.S. citizen.

These ideas are intriguing, but I remain skeptical about passage of any amendments, which require a two-thirds vote in Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states. Amendments — fundamental changes to our founding document — should be rare.

Democrats can't win by attacking their own

This column was published in the Wilson Times July 13, 2019.

My wife and I watched the first two Democratic Party debates June 26-27 because we didn’t know much about most of the Democratic candidates for president and wanted to see what kind of choices we’d have on primary day (nearly a year away). Although we had trouble keeping up with the names and faces of 20 candidates, we did come away with some impressions, some of which were favorable to the candidates.

Watching what most analysts proclaimed the most impressive discussion of the entire debate and the turning point of the evening, I told my wife, “The Republicans have to be loving this.”

The incident was Sen. Kamala Harris’ angry takedown of Joe Biden, until that moment the leading Democratic candidate, according to polls. Until she tore into Biden, I had been dreaming of what a Harris-Trump presidential debate might look like in the general election campaign. Harris had displayed, in both the debate and in the Senate hearings on Supreme Court nominee Bret Kavenaugh, her persuasive, effective debating skills that she had developed and practiced as a prosecuting attorney and California attorney general.

But I never expected her to aim her attack on Biden, the former vice president who served 26 years in the U.S. Senate. Harris’ attack was obviously planned and practiced. She came to the edge of calling Biden a closet racist without actually saying that. She attacked Biden for having said he worked with Democratic segregationists to get good things done in the Senate. As a senator, Harris knows you don’t get things done in the upper chamber unless you have a three-fifths majority, and that often means corralling a few senators with contrary views but decades of longevity and considerable legislative power. In a recent speech, Biden had acknowledged that and bragged of his effectiveness, because of his abilities, in getting important civil rights legislation passed.

Harris added to that attack with another angle, a sort of flanking movement against Biden, saying he failed to support busing as a means of forcing racial integration in schools. Biden said he only opposed the U.S. Department of Justice’s demand, contrary to local feelings, that children should be bused away from their neighborhood schools to achieve an arbitrary racial balance.

Proving her attack on Biden was planned and practiced, Harris said she was one of those children who were bused — two decades after Brown v. Board of Education — and her campaign conveniently posted a photo of cute little Kamala on her way to first grade.

The Harris campaign failed to acknowledge at the time that Harris had supported just the sort of busing that Biden defended — busing that had the support of local elected officials and families — but not Washington-ordered, disruptive busing. Perhaps Harris is too young to remember how traumatic “forced busing” solutions were. In South Boston, a thousand miles from the segregationist states of the Old South, violent riots broke out as opponents opposed busing children to distant schools in other neighborhoods. The federal government, frustrated by local opposition, ordered more and more desegregation solutions built on putting small children on school buses for hours each day. The city of Richmond, VA, was told it would have to bus children to and from neighboring suburban municipalities, obliterating boundaries established by the state constitution.

After recognizing the futility of ordering private citizens to send children to a school designated by bureaucrats in distant Washington, D.C., federal officials backed off the oppressive “fall in line or else” approach, and the busing controversy faded away. Some cities, such as Charlotte, embraced a form of busing (with various options for families).

In the 1990s, after several efforts to create a mandated racial balance in schools, the Wilson County Board of Education abandoned its paired-school (court mandated) desegregation plan in favor of a neighborhood school plan. African-American members of the Board of Education voted with the majority for neighborhood schools, ending cross-town busing.

The worst thing loyal Democrats can do in the 2020 presidential election is sabotage their leading candidates with misleading criticism of what they did or didn’t do a generation or more ago. Don’t create a “circular firing squad” to choose the party’s nominee.

Caller ID, this is Caller ID

In the last few days, I've been calling myself on our land line (yes, we still have one). When the phone rings, I stop what I'm doing and walk to the phone to look at the caller ID. Then, depending on the caller ID, I answer the phone or (more likely), I end the call.

A half dozen or more times in the last week, the caller ID has announced that the caller was me. "Hal Tarleton" the caller ID said, followed by my land line phone number (which I won't include here so as not to encourage other such calls).

This weird phenomenon (I called my own number from my own number!) also happens on my cell phone. Odd calls, at all hours of the day, but particularly around meal time, show up on my cell phone showing me I'm being called by myself or a person unknown to me.

I do not answer these calls. I have tried blocking the calls, but that seems to do no good. The phone keeps ringing with the same mysterious caller IDs. Sometimes it is a person's name, sometimes even a name that looks familiar; sometimes the caller ID is only a location, such as Moyock, NC (I don't know anyone in Moyock).

The problem isn't that lots of people are suddenly calling me. The problem is that telemarketers have found a way to counterfeit caller IDs and phone numbers to make calls in disguise. This is the hackers' way around the vaunted but largely unsuccessful "Do Not Call" lists. The current callers from counterfeited caller IDs are laughing at the "Do Not Call" lists. There is no enforcement, no effective punishment for commercial abuse of telephone services, whether by copper wire or cellular signals.

The fundamental problem is that the Federal Communications Commission and Congress are not serious about the annoying, disruptive and downright infuriating telephone calls. The calls range from offers of time-share vacations to warnings "from Microsoft" that your computer is going to stop working if you don't respond to this call and send us money pronto! A few people fall for these sales pitches, and the telemarketers and scam artists have just enough success to make their tactics profitable.

Legislation that would put some teeth in the bans on unsolicited calling keeps stalling in Congress. Political candidates are not touting this issue, and no groundswell is developing. These calls are an annoyance in a political atmosphere with much more serious problems.

Won't someone please address this annoying development?
 

Partisan Gerrymandering threatens democracy

This post originally was published in the Wilson Times July 6, 2019.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling last week that the court has no jurisdiction over partisan gerrymandering constitutes a baffling abandonment of basic democratic principles. The court sent the matter back to the state legislatures, which have been busily making it more difficult for candidates in one party to get elected while the other party, the one drawing the electoral district lines, gets to yawn through elections confident that they have the votes. After all, the latter party got to choose who would vote in the election.

Gerrymandering, having been done by both parties in various states, is a rejection of the Supreme Court’s 1964 “one person, one vote” ruling, which held that one group of voters could not have greater impact than other groups. Congressional districts had to be of roughly equal population so that each voter’s ballot would have the same impact in the House of Representatives. The ruling also applied to state legislative districts. A state could not give each county one seat in the State Senate (as some in North Carolina wanted) because the counties’ populations are not equal.

Like those forbidden voting populations, partisan gerrymandering denies voters equal impact in an election. Although running for office in same-population districts, candidates of the party drawing the lines have far better chances of winning the election. Thus, voters supporting the other political party cast votes that have little chance of winning. In North Carolina, a state with a nearly even partisan division among voters, shrewd gerrymandering has given Republicans a 10-3 advantage in congressional seats.

The court’s decision to let partisan politicians have their way takes America a step toward one-party rule and leaves voters with the possibility that future election ballots may not have any choices. Elections become superfluous, and fair representation is denied. The party in power will stay in power because it gets to choose who votes.

In North Carolina, the Democratic Party and Common Cause have filed suit over the GOP’s highly partisan redistricting plans. If the high court continues to stand behind this new precedent, Democrats will have few options:

1.    They could all abandon the Democratic Party and re-register as Republicans, then carry out a subversive effort to replace that party’s leadership with people more committed to democracy and less dedicated to raw political power.

       2.    They can propose a federal law that clearly defines partisan gerrymanders and makes them illegal. Because many states’ congressional districts are already gerrymandered and Republicans hold a solid majority in the U.S. Senate, it may be impossible to find the votes to get such legislation through Congress.

          3. The plaintiffs can go back to the federal courts and try to persuade the increasingly partisan Supreme Court to reconsider its decision. Chief Justice Roberts says the courts have no jurisdiction over the drawing of electoral districts. Surely the chief justice is familiar with the concept of “checks and balances.” If the courts are not going to be allowed to limit the worst instincts of state legislatures, there are no checks and balances, and there is no representative democracy. The court has been less reluctant to take on matters that, like partisan gerrymandering, are not mentioned in the Constitution, such as same-sex marriage, abortion, and public education.

This ruling will go down in history as an abandonment of liberty. When there are no fairly elected representatives, there is no democracy.