Day 19: Talk one way, vote another.

This is Part X of a series of calls to the DC office of my Congressional representative, John Faso (NY-19). The nine previous calls (sorry, the IX previous calls) are linked below.

I'm still interested in my long-term questions about doing diddly with regards to tariffs, and whether Faso would vote for impeachment in the case that Trump were to literally murder someone. I last brought those up on June 18, so maybe I'll check in with them again next Monday, which will be two weeks since the last time I asked.

In the meantime, I've turned my attention to the humanitarian disaster Trump created on the southern border.

Good afternoon. I’m calling in regards to HR 6136, the immigration bill the House voted on yesterday.

Yes.

I see that Congressman Faso voted in favor of the bill.

I haven’t looked that up.

I checked on the website of the House clerk, and he’s in the “Ayes” column.

OK.

Demanding the impossible

Reading up on yesterday’s primary in my home district of NY-19, I was struck by this remark:

Green Party candidate Steve Greenfield also congratulated Delgado, but said, quote, “In all ways, the Delgado victory illustrates the vacating of Democratic Party responsibility for offering experienced, locally sourced, politically progressive candidates to voters in New York's 19th District.”

I’ve been out of the country for the year, so I haven’t been following the Democratic primary race all that closely. My main lens on the race was the group “Sustainable Otsego,” and in that circle, Mr. Delgado was ranked at or near the bottom. There are concerns about his support for gas pipelines, and his lack of support for thorough reform in health insurance, such as a single-payer system.

Regarding the alternatives, it seems like three or four of the candidates had passionate support from people who consider themselves progressives and have better claim to being “locally sourced” and having political experience. So Mr. Greenfield would presumably have preferred one of them to have come out on top.

But I’m having trouble understanding what Mr. Greenfield thinks the Democratic Party should have done.

Day 16: Would Faso support a hearing?

It had been a few days since I'd spoken with the polite staff at the office of Congressman John Faso (NY-19), so I thought I'd check in.

I’d like to thank the congressman for voting “No” on the Goodlatte bill that came up in the House.

I’ll pass that along.

I’m also glad the immediate crisis is defused with the executive order from last Wednesday, but that is far from solving the problem. For one thing, there’s the question of what happens when we reach the 20-day deadline imposed by the Flores settlement. Where does the congressman stand on indefinite detention of children?

The congressman opposes separation of families, and detention of children. He is for reunification, and he supports the immigration bill that should be coming up later this week, though they’re not sure when that will be.

Here I overlooked an important implication: Trump’s executive order “solves” the problem of family separation by allowing children to stay with their parents—in detention. So if Faso opposes detention of children, it follows that he opposes trumps EO. Typing this up, that jumps off the page at me, but I missed it at the time. Bad lawyer! If you’re interested, feel free to call the office and follow up on this.

Does that bill do anything to address the reunification of children who’ve already been separated?

I’m not sure.

Referenda are tricky

A commenter on Daily Kos suggested that direct democracy (i.e., settling things by referendum) is now technologically easier than it used to be, and it would solve the problem of, “Will the person I vote for actually represent my interests?”

But I don’t think it does that.

The major problem with settling lots of things via direct democracy is that law often has to be nuanced, and referenda aren’t great for that.

For instance, how would health-insurance reform go via referendum?

We could put up a simple question, along the lines of, “Do you support a national, single-payer health-insurance system?” But no matter how simple a system you’re trying to create (and it’s technically possible to create one a lot simpler than Obamacare), there are some unavoidable decisions that are difficult.

1. What is the list of things that the basic package will cover?
2. How much will providers be paid? And on a fee-for-service basis? A per-patient basis? Etc.
3. What will the revenue source be? General governmental revenues (the same pot of personal income taxes, corporate income taxes, etc., as most of the budget)? A dedicated payroll tax like Social Security and Medicare?
4. A related question: if there’s compulsory buy-in rather than simple provision by government, what is the formula for subsidizing purchase of insurance by lower- and middle-income households?

If we keep the referendum itself simple by leaving out these questions, then we have the question of what body will fill in these unavoidable details. Whatever that body is, we’re back to the problem of our representative bodies being potentially unresponsive to our will.

Scars of dictatorship: Part II

In the previous part of this post I discussed the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (ÚSTR) and the reason it was created—in short, the history of Nazi occupation and communist rule left a complex moral legacy that needs investigation and thoughtful incorporation into the country’s political discourse and education.

I was prompted to that discussion by an event this past week, involving the institute, one of its historians, and the current prime minister, Andrej Babiš.

Babiš is, to put it mildly, a controversial figure.

Thanks, American!

I just read that American Airlines is refusing to transport children whom ICE is moving further away from their parents.

I wrote to thank them.

They don't let you write your message until you choose a subject area from the list that they offer you.

They didn't envision having to field public responses regarding a policy of not participating in child theft. I did the best I could:

This isn't really about "Vacations," but you don't have a topic area for "Corporation refusing to participate in humanitarian catastrophe."

I just read that American Airlines is refusing to transport children who have been separated from their families in the ongoing humanitarian disaster at the border.

I applaud you for this decision.

Day 13: Some daylight

Well, that was unexpected.

My preparation for the call was the congressman’s Facebook statement from yesterday afternoon that Adrienne Martini called to my attention:

My latest on children being separated from their parents at the border:

"This is a humanitarian issue, and the policy of separating children from their parents is wrong and needs to be addressed immediately. For too many years and administrations, Washington has failed to address how to secure our borders while also ensuring our immigration policies are humane and address the real challenges our border enforcement officers face every day.

"Congress should address this issue quickly, and the compromise legislation I support will do so. In addition, this legislation improves border security, resolves the status of the DACA population and contains other reforms such as the end of the diversity lottery. This legislation would be the most significant reform to our broken immigration system in many decades, and it represents a good-faith compromise that will forever put an end to this disruptive practice."

My take away was that, while I appreciated the congressman’s recognition that this is a “humanitarian situation,” there were some vague points I wanted cleared up.

First, I wondered whether “the compromise bill” referenced in the statement was the bill put together by Paul Ryan that I’d read about.

According to the staffer, there are a number of bills being considered.

OK.

So the next question had to do with “resolving the status of the DACA population.” Without knowing what kind of “resolution” he has in mind, this language isn’t all that helpful.

Day 11: The absurd things staff can't tell you

Yet another installment in my quest to find out if my congressman (Faso, NY-19) has any thoughts on the world happening around him. (The full list of earlier efforts is linked at the end.)

I have a couple of questions I’ve been trying to get answered, and I’d like to follow up on.

First off, I still would like to know whether the congressman is working with his colleagues to rein in the trade war the president has launched with our closest allies.

I don’t deal with that area.

I’m also checking in on my question about Mr. Faso’s views on the extent of presidential power. If the president were to murder someone investigating him, would the congressman vote for impeachment?

OK, I’ll pass that along.

You realize the background for this question, of course, which is the statement by the president’s lawyer that Mr. Trump could kill James Comey and there would be no way to indict him. The only pathway to justice would be via impeachment and conviction. That means that the president is in fact above the law unless Congress is willing to impeach and remove him for a clear crime, such as murder.

If Mr. Faso wouldn’t vote for impeachment in the case of murder, then he is saying that the president is above the law. I really want to know if that’s his view.

[I can’t remember the full exchange in here, but at some point she dropped a mention about how questions are usually answered in about two weeks.]

This is the seventh time I’ve called in the last two weeks, so there’s a good chance I’ve spoken to everyone in the office. My name’s Karl Seeley—are you one of the people I’ve spoken to?

I don’t recall speaking to you.

I’ve been asking about the trade war since Monday, June 4th. I’ve been asking about presidential powers since Wednesday, June 6th. Everyone I’ve spoken to has been polite and professional. Everyone I’ve spoken to has said they’ll see that my questions are passed along to the congressman. And yet I still haven’t heard an answer.

So about two weeks is a normal time to get an answer?

Two to three weeks, usually.

OK, so if I haven’t gotten an answer in about three weeks, I should assume he’s blowing me off?

No, ...

I do have one more concern.

On our southern border, agents of our government are separating children from their parents. I was unable to find anything about that on the congressman’s website.

Do you know if he’s made any statement about it?

Yes, he was on NPR last week and said he didn’t agree with it.

Scars of dictatorship: Part I

The Nazi and communist periods run across Czech history like a scar, and these days it seems to be festering, rather than healing.

In the particular incident I’m referring to, a historian who works at the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes was criticized by the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, for calling out behavior that has echoes of the kind of thing that happens in totalitarian regimes. But we need to back up and look at why there is an Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (ÚSTR).

The underlying idea is that when a nation has been through a dictatorship, its society has been warped by the crimes of that government, and as part of the healing process, it is useful to have a body whose job is to document those crimes and understand the damage they caused.

There are the relatively obvious harms, of people being jailed or killed for saying the wrong thing, having the wrong friends, coming from the wrong parents. Those are bad enough, and the people who were killed are never coming back, and the people who were jailed are never getting those years back. But at least the harm is visible and easy to understand.

Both regimes, however, created a kind of damage that was more woven into the fabric of society, which made it harder to see and much harder to talk about “right” and “wrong.”

I think Americans view a totalitarian regime as some sort of alien organism, something outside the society. There’s the general public, who are “good,” who are “victims,” and there’s the regime, which is perpetrates evil.

Reality is much more complicated.

Free lunch: an exploration

A friend linked to this story about a Turkish company that makes wind turbines to be installed between lanes of traffic, where they turn the moving air from passing vehicles into electricity. He wondered whether it would just slow down the buses.

My reply turned into something much too long for a Facebook comment, so I put it here.

It sounds like you’re asking a sort of First-Law question: since energy can’t magically come from nowhere, the energy turning these turbines has to come from somewhere. In other words, you’re asking if this is a free lunch, which is always a good question in the face of a proposed source of energy.

I suppose it’s possible that the turbines alter the airflow in the bus lanes in a way that makes it harder for the buses to push through the air. It that’s true, then yes, the bus engines are having to work harder to cover the same distance at the same speed.

I can also imagine it’s possible that the energy contained in the airflow away from the buses is just being dissipated as waste heat, and these turbines are capturing a piece of that and making it useful.

Or maybe there’s some drag on the buses, but not enough offset the energy generated by the turbines.

At any rate, it seems like it would be an interesting study for someone in aerodynamics (on the other hand, maybe someone who actually knows aerodynamics already knows the answer and would consider it a trivial question).

I was, however, taken aback by the video’s reference to “vertical access” turbines, because the term is “vertical AXIS,” which makes a whole lot more sense. Somewhere along the line in producing this video, there was a person who didn’t look at text, but just wrote down spoken language. Maybe it was the original reporter, in which case that person didn’t know enough about the technology to understand what was being described.

Along similar lines, it says, “1 turbine can create one kilowatt of electricity per hour.” This is a confused statement.

Waste not, want not

Iceland is in the World Cup.

The Netherlands are out.

The Czechs are out.

The US is out (no great surprise, though we had made our way in the last several times).

Italy is out.

But Iceland is in.

A country of 334,000 people has played its way into a berth in the World Cup.

An article in this week’s Respekt talked about the background of this surprising success.*

“20 years ago, Iceland used the money from television broadcast rights from international soccer associations for the launch of a massive system of educating trainers. The island now has the densest network of trained soccer coaches in the world.”

“Children as young as 8 or 9 are being coached exclusively by highly trained coaches who support creativity and the development of young boys’ potential.” [This sentence gives the impression that girls aren’t playing soccer much; I don’t know if that’s true, or just an unfortunate phrasing.] “Loud-mouthed hot-heads who assign squats as a punishment for less talented kids or those who make mistakes have disappeared from the coaches’ benches, as have self-taught daddies.”

In other words, they built from the bottom.

And not just figuratively in terms of training up their trainers.

Day 9: Not telling, vs. not knowing

The next installment in my continuing futile efforts to see whether my congressman feels like doing his job. (Links to earlier installments are at the end - I'm counting days by number of work days, not number of days I've called.)

I’m checking in on my question from Monday, as to whether the congressman is working with his colleagues to rein in the trade war the president has launched with our closest allies.

I’m not the staffer who deals with that area, but I’ll be sure to write it down and get it to him. [Takes my name and email.]

I’m also checking in on my question about Mr. Faso’s views on the extent of presidential power. Rudy Giuliani says that the president could kill James Comey, and it would still be impossible to indict him; the only remedy would be impeachment. So I’d like to know how Mr. Faso would respond if the president were indeed to murder a person investigating his possible conspiracy with a foreign power. Would he vote to impeach?

I don’t know the answer to that. I’ll be sure to get the question to him.

Day 6: Don’t got no opinion about that

I had been planning a short call, a follow-up from last week’s questions (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday) about presidential powers. But then the weekend happened, so my planned simple question ended up being a brief coda to a significantly longer call.

I saw that Mr. Faso has issued a press release pointing out the damage that could happen to small businesses in upstate New York as a result of the tariffs the president is pursuing.

Uh, huh.

That’s a fine statement as far as it goes, but I was wondering if he were planning to actually do anything.

I haven’t had a chance to talk with the Congressman about that issue specifically, but if you’d like to share your views, I will pass them along.

OK. Here’s the thing: The tariff decision by itself was bad enough, but this weekend, things went badly off the rails.

The president started a trade war with Canada, and then when Canada defended itself, the president’s advisors had the gall to call the Canadian response a betrayal. And as if it weren’t bad enough that they were acting like spoiled children who aren’t getting their way, they threw in a dangerous anti-Semitic dog-whistle by using the phrase “stab in the back.”

This seems to go beyond merely bad policy. It really looks like he is actively trying to tear apart the fabric of the western alliance that has protected our country since the end of World War II.

And the silence from Republicans is, frankly, deafening. Is Mr. Faso concerned with what the president’s actions are doing to our international security?

I haven’t had a chance to talk with the Congressman about that, but I’ll be sure to let him know your concerns.

Day 5 (no Day 4): Chipper, but no answer

I didn't get around to calling yesterday, but here's my follow-up to my calls from Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

Good morning, I’m calling to ask what Mr. Faso’s response would be if the president were to commit a murder.

Uh, we don’t have a statement on that.

I’m asking, of course, because on Sunday Rudy Giuliani went on TV and said that the president could kill James Comey, and nobody in the government would have the authority to indict him.

Ah-ha [recognition of why on Earth I was asking this question]

The only remedy, in Giuliani’s view, is impeachment and removal, and only then could the president be indicted.

In other words, this isn’t a hypothetical—well, it is a hypothetical, but it’s not something that’s absurd to talk about because the president’s own lawyer brought it up. It seems to be part of his own claim of how far his powers extend.

And that makes it a very relevant question for every member of the House: If the president literally killed a person conducting an investigation into the conduct of the president himself, would Mr. Faso vote to impeach?

I will see that he gets this question.

Day 3: Would Faso impeach for murder?

I called again today (as I did yesterday and Monday).

I laid out the basic pieces of the argument:

1. The letter from the president’s lawyers arguing he can shut down any investigation at any time, for any reason, explicitly including an investigation into himself.
2. His own tweet saying he has the power to pardon himself.
3. Rudy Giuliani’s claim that Trump could literally kill James Comey and he still wouldn’t be subject to indictment—the only remedy is impeachment.

That led to two questions.

Does Mr. Faso oppose these claims of dictatorial power.

I haven’t spoken to the congressman about that, but I’ll be sure to pass along your question.

Day 2: still no position

I was shorter this time than yesterday, and I didn't get into asking the staffer on the phone his own opinion.

I simply asked whether the Congressman (John Faso, NY-19) had yet taken a position on whether the president is above the law.

"There is no statement about that yet."

"OK."

"Could I get your comment for the Congressman about that?"

"Yes. I want to know what he thinks about the president declaring he has the power to pardon himself, and that he has the power to shut down any investigation at any time, for any reason, including an investigation of himself. That is the essence of dictatorial power, and I'd really like to know the congressman's views on it."

"OK."

"I plan to call every day until I have an answer."

"OK. Could I have your name?"

Gave him my name, from Oneonta. Didn't bother leaving my email. We'll be talking again tomorrow.

Day 3's conversation is here.

Not going to get an answer ...

This afternoon I called my Congressman, John Faso (NY-19) to raise the issue of Trump’s declaration that he has unlimited power to pardon himself and to halt any investigation, for any reason whatsoever.

(I was responding to the letter from his lawyers to Mueller back in January that the NY Times published this past Friday, but then later saw that earlier today he himself tweeted the part about unlimited pardon powers.)

It was no surprise that the staffer in Faso’s office didn’t know whether the congressman had a view on the matter. I’ve gotten similar “blank stares” to the question of whether it’s a good idea for Trump to take classified info from Israeli intelligence and share it with Russia’s ambassador and foreign minister.

And I went several rounds with his office on health insurance, receiving a series of letters (e.g., here) that didn’t answer my actual questions, and that displayed fundamental misunderstanding of how insurance works.

On today's call, I said it was important to me to live in a democracy rather than a dictatorship, and that the claims Trump’s lawyers made on his behalf would create the conditions for a dictatorship.

I asked the staffer himself if he had a view on whether it was a good idea for a president to have unlimited powers.

Now, I know it’s bad form to give the staffers a hard time. They’re just doing their jobs, after all. They’re not voting in Congress, so their personal opinions are really not relevant.

But surely there’s a line somewhere, isn’t there?