Chapter 03 - Merrick and Mitch
Caroline made clear that this was a job done at the office, not remotely, and if and when things got very busy an element of the job was to be the office manager. Otherwise, the job mainly entailed sitting with Caroline as she worked out her ideas and future plans for the organization and giving feedback to this early thinking. Nicole thought it odd that a CEO would want feedback from a newbie, but she was very attracted to the job given that function, even if there would be a lot of busy work along with it.
The day before Caroline had hired an IT/Web person whom she knew from her days at the accounting firm, Michael Chong. He had changed jobs multiple times since then and looked forward to working with Caroline again, as well as to be the one in charge and not have to deal with an overbearing manager.
Caroline told Michael about the business function and her worry if they did reach their goal of establishing a strong presence and becoming well known by most Americans, that some ultra right-wing groups opposed to their work would try to hack the Website and the staff emails. On the other hand, she doubted there would be much information that really needed to be kept secret, but she felt uncomfortable trying to predict that for certain. Michael came up with a near-term plan that would work at the outset and if later there needed to be added security he could ramp that up at the time.
The elements of the IT plan were straightforward. Each staff member would be given a new laptop to be used only on The Minute Women’s work and to be powered off when not in use. Likewise, they’d be given a cell phone with the same proviso. Michael would register a domain name for the Website and the email accounts, but use commercial ecommerce providers to host this. He would also have an organization VPN, required to access organization material online, and deploy two-factor authentication as well. Michael told Caroline that this wasn’t perfect, but it was do-able and the entire setup could get put up quickly, as could the linked fundraising page that the organization needed. Michael also said he could put in a modest amount of sophisticated tracking on the Website, so he’d know if there were unusual visits to the site being made, and the Let-Us-Hear-From-You page would have a list of keywords programmed in to send alerts generated by threatening messages.
Caroline seem impressed that Michael had things under control. Immediately after they met Caroline ordered a dozen laptops and cell phones that Michael could set up for assignment to staff members as they were hired. They had taken delivery of the equipment that morning and Michael was busy getting it ready.
As Caroline turned her thoughts to replaying the meeting with Jackie, as if by magic a call came in that was from Jackie. Caroline was surprised. It wasn’t that long since they had met. Jackie, on her part, said she wanted another meeting where she would bring along her writing partner for the Congresswoman. She couldn’t do it this evening but could do it the following day. Caroline was elated. Maybe the pieces of the puzzle were coming together.
* * * * *
Jackie introduced Caroline to Elena Campos by explaining that it was Elena who hired Jackie to work for the Congresswoman. Elena and Jackie were the speech writing team and they enjoyed working together very much. After Caroline shook Elena’s hand and they were getting seated at the conference table, Caroline stole a quick glance at Elena. She was tall and her dark hair had streaks of gray. Caroline guessed that Elena was about five year older than Jackie, though thought it rude to ask Elena her age at this juncture, so just mentally filed that thought away till a more appropriate time.
Jackie explained that while she very much liked Caroline’s presentation the other day, she really wanted to continue working with Elena as a writer and wondered if Caroline would be okay with offering the same moonlighting job to each of them. Caroline nodded her assent to that. Then Jackie continued by saying she had already given an overview of the work to Elena and that Elena had a few questions she wanted to have answered before they’d both be willing to sign up.
“Would that be okay?” Jackie asked.
Again, Caroline nodded her assent. Now it was Elena’s turn.
She began, “I liked the overall idea very much, but as I’ve written for several different bosses in the past, I’m a bit wary of micromanaging from the top. And in this case, Jackie and I are lawyers, while you are not. Caroline, can you give some sense of how you envision the relationship between you and the writing team?”
To the surprise of both Jackie and Elena, Caroline began to get emotional and started to tear up. Jackie asked Caroline whether she was alright. Caroline nodded that she was. Then Caroline took a few deep breaths before giving her response.
“I don’t think the lawyer thing will be an issue, but other things very well might be. This will be my first time in the role of the boss and I’m sure I’ll make lots of mistakes, as any novice would. I hope I can learn from them and you can bear with me while that’s happening. The other thing, maybe it’s even a bigger deal than being a novice as a manager, is that I’m totally invested in the idea of The Minute Women.”
In an effort to give Caroline a break, Elena interrupted and said, “Jackie told me that you’d be paying us out of your own funds the first several months. That is quite a commitment.”
Caroline replied, “For me it’s the emotional commitment to the work that’s much bigger than the money part. I’m going to give everything I possibly have to make this idea come to fruition. And along with that, I’ve always been a bit of a perfectionist. I may micromanage, especially before we establish good work rhythms, because of that. I’m sorry, but that’s what the situation is.”
Caroline again looked emotional and some more tears appeared. Jackie gave her a hug and repeatedly said, it’s okay. Elena gave a look at Jackie who was nodding as if to say this is no act. This is who Caroline really is. Based on that, Elena thought it best to change tack. When Caroline appeared a little calmer Elena started in with the alternate approach.
“Caroline, I’ve worked for many bosses, all men until now. Even working for the Congresswoman, her chief of staff is a man. None of them ever were as forthcoming as you just were in our very first conversation. It’s refreshing to see such openness. If that’s that norm, I’m sure we can work out all the little issues that might come up. And I’ll enjoy doing it.”
‘Thank you, Elena. I like to be open with my work contacts, if I possibly can. It makes the work much more enjoyable in my experience.”
“Then maybe I’ll just skip a bunch of my other questions. They seem less important now. What I’d like to do, if it’s okay with you, is to discuss a particular writing project that you already have in mind and consider it in some detail. Can we do that?”
“Yes, that is just what we should do. By the way, before we get going I wanted to let you know that I ordered some pizza which should be delivered here in about 20 minutes. So that will provide a brief interruption. In the previous meeting with Jackie, it was beginning to get late and neither of us had any dinner. I think that made us conclude a bit prematurely. Tonight we’ll go as long as need be.”
Caroline watched as Jackie and Elena each took out a notebook and a pen. She asked them whether she should record the meeting. They both replied that was unnecessary. Taking notes was what they were used to. Caroline suppressed an urge to ask what happened to the notes after the writing project had concluded. That might become an important consideration down the road, but now it was an unnecessary detail to pursue.
Caroline began, “The first project we will work on is President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, which happened in the middle of March in 2016. We will consider all the events that ensued after that and consider them based on what we now know, more than six years later.”
Elena jumped in, “Caroline, do you need prepared notes to conduct the rest of this session?” I’m surprised you don’t have any paper in front of you.”
Caroline gave a big smile. “This one I know by heart, I’ve been through it in my head many times. If I say anything that doesn’t jive with your memory, please make note of it and we can do fact checking after the session.” Both Jackie and Elena nodded.
“The next step is to go directly to the Constitution and quote Article II, Section 2, where it discusses powers of the President.”
“There is nothing more specific about how the Advice and Consent process of the Senate should work. The Senate seems free to set its own rules to guide the process. But then it must adhere to them after the President has made the nomination.”
Jackie interrupted here. “Caroline, you memorized that paragraph about treaties, appointments, and advice and consent?”
Caroline smiled again. “Yes, I did. I have this funny feeling that our entire office will know that paragraph by heart in the coming months without me telling anyone to do that. And they will memorize what comes next as well.”
Jackie asked, “What’s that?”
“Senators oath of office.”
“Then we need to go to the history that followed the Obama nomination of Merrick Garland. Mitch McConnell sat on the appointment and never initiated the Advice and Consent process. He must have confided with the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who wrote a letter saying they would never take up the appointment. You can find reports of this online from different news sources. I leave it to you to choose which source or sources to use in making the case. But I don’t believe that what happened is in doubt. It is a matter of record.”
“Evidently, Mitch McConnell violated the Constitution and thereby violated his oath of office and ditto for the Republican Senators on the Judiciary Committee. So that’s the opening salvo. Do you have any questions at this point?”
Jackie said, “Caroline, did you realize that when you talked about McConnell and the other Senators violating the Constitution that your voice got higher by about an octave and your speech got notably faster?”
Caroline said, “Thanks for letting me know. I’ve got to be more in control in the future. The audience needs to know that we’re making a reasoned argument. This is not a witchhunt.”
Jackie then said to Elena, “At our previous meeting I noted to Caroline that she usually talks in a monotone. This outburst was anything but usual.”
Elena responded, “I get it. It’s been quite emotional already this evening. But to make the case we need to be level and avoid unnecessary emotion. I’m liking the way you’ve put things so far. I have no questions at this point.”
Caroline continued, “Then let’s push on. The next question, a rhetorical one, is to ask whether McConnell and the others were held to account. The obvious answer is that they weren’t. A brief plug here can be given for The Minute Women. We exist to do that now. A longer description of The Minute Women’s purpose should be given at the end of the document.”
“The real question to tackle here is this one. Why did they do it? Why didn’t they follow the usual Advice and Consent process with the aim of getting a vote against Merrick Garland to defeat the nomination. In consequence, the two alternatives would seem to lead to the same outcome. Yet they apparently had a strong preference for not taking up the nomination at all. Why was that?”
Elena responded, “Caroline, I’m guessing that you have a well thought through answer to that question. But most readers won’t have done that as of yet. So it’s here that the document can provide value to what is already known. Is that right?”
Caroline was nodding, “Elena, you are a good listener. That is completely correct. Let me now sketch the answer which you can flesh out further in the writing.”
“Let’s begin with the obvious. These acts were done to gain political advantage. That there is a political component to the Advice and Consent process should not surprise anyone. But I believe that political component escalated in importance since the Nixon era. Jackie, you remember that in the American Politics course we took in college there was a segment on President Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do. And the interesting consequence was not so much that the Bork nomination was defeated, though of course that was important, but rather how it influenced Conservative thinking about such nominations after that.”
Just then the buzzer rang. Caroline looked a bit disoriented for a second until Jackie said it was the pizza. Then Caroline nodded, got some cash from her purse, and went to pay the delivery guy. After she brought the pizza back to conference room, Caroline indicated there were paper plates and napkins in the cabinet. For her part, Caroline got out some soft drinks and plastic cups. They took a break for a few minutes then to get started on the dinner. Caroline joked that they should eat up because any pizza left over was going to be her breakfast tomorrow and she didn’t need the calories. Elena joked back that based on the session so far, Caroline didn’t need a writing staff at all. She had the story down so well. Then Caroline responded.
“No. I really need you guys. The tone of the white papers is crucial. It can’t be preaching to the choir. It needs to have real crossover appeal. This doesn’t work if it’s only Democrats who read the white papers and buy the arguments there. A sizable number of Independents and Republicans need to do likewise. The part that scares me is not the argument itself, but how we know that the tone in making the argument achieves this goal. That burden will be on the writing staff. It’s a big deal.”
Jackie and Elena were munching on their pizza and just nodded in response. Caroline asked if it was okay to continue with presentation. Jackie and Elena indicated that it was though taking notes and eating pizza at the same time was a little tricky.
Caroline resumed. “There are two possible explanations about the preference not to take up the nomination of Merrick Garland. One is about timing. The Advice and Consent process if fully pursued would have extended into the late spring and maybe even into the summer. It would then have taken a prominent place in the news and become part of the speculation about the upcoming election. By not taking up the nomination at all, it no longer would be news when the race for President began to heat up. And they preferred that outcome. The other is a possibility that Merrick Garland would have been confirmed. He had some crossover appeal. During the more recent confirmation hearings when Garland was nominated for Attorney General, the vote was 70 for and 30 against. Confirmation of Attorney General is not the same thing as confirmation of a Supreme Court Justice, but it suggests McConnell might have perceived some risk that he couldn’t block Garland through the regular Advice and Consent process. By not taking up the nomination, McConnell avoided the risk entirely.”
Caroline then asked a rhetorical question. “If Hillary Clinton won the election in 2016, would it have mattered whether Merrick Garland was confirmed or not?” Caroline answered her own question. “Probably not.”
Caroline then followed up with this. “While middle March was much earlier than the Democratic and Republican conventions, there would have been early polling done about a head to head race with the likely candidates from the two parties. In that polling, Hillary Clinton had the lead. She was the favorite to win the election almost till the very end. But there is something flawed with the way much of the polling is done. It predicts the popular vote, which Hillary Clinton did win pretty decisively, but it doesn’t necessarily predict the Electoral College vote. To do that, there really should be state by state polling, with the results then aggregated. Implicitly there is some discussion of this alternative by considering swing states. But there isn’t a full fledged methodology presented as the polling results, because that would be a much more complex animal and harder for many Americans to make good sense out of it. Lifetime politicians at the national level, however, almost surely study this information carefully. It’s a good bet that McConnell was well aware of how the polls for President broke down on a state by state basis and that he had a reasonable forecast of how the election would turn out. I haven’t seen the data, but I’m guessing that they show the race was very close.”
“Then we should consider how McConnell’s decision impacted voting behavior. I’ve checked some and while the open Supreme Court position mattered to voters, McConnell holding back the Merrick Garland nomination didn’t get much mention at all. It was already in the past and no longer news that people thought about. And it seems clear that the possibility of getting rid of Roe energized Christian Evangelical voters, who strongly supported Trump in spite of his personal failings. There were other factors that helped Trump, to be sure. Bernie supporters were somewhat miffed at Clinton. Some of them voted for Trump. Others didn’t vote at all. It’s hard to know the relative importance of these factors, but there is no doubt that they mattered.”
“There’s one more point to make to complete this round of the argument.”
“Is there another round of the argument beyond that?” Elena asked.
“Yes, there is. But let’s take a pause to reflect after I give this last point.”
“Okay,” Elena said.
“To lend cover to what he was doing, McConnell relied on a quote from Joe Biden that there should not be Supreme Court nominations during a Presidential election year. I think there was a quote from Chuck Schumer that may have also been used, which said pretty much the same thing. You’ll need to check on that. That this was only cover, and not something that McConnell actually believed, was revealed after President Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. That happened near the end of September. Yet McConnell was able to get the nomination through quickly, with the vote to confirm her held a month later, before the election. Given this history, McConnell and the other Republicans on the Judiciary committee in 2016 never had to publicly explain their actual thinking abut what they did. The argument I gave until now is to try to come up with what that thinking must have been. But I’ve done that purely based on the known facts and then thinking those through. It’s not information I heard from any high ranking Republican.”
Jackie stepped in. “So, putting this into layman’s terms, McConnell and the other Republicans on the Judiciary committee cheated and they were rewarded for that instead of being punished. Is that right?”
Caroline, while nodding, said “You hit the nail on the head, Jackie. That’s it.”
“Then why do we need to consider another round of the argument? This appears sufficient to me.”
“Because we need to consider the larger context, in particular, the Republican approach on appointments when Obama was President and the impact of that on the rules that the Senate operates under during the Advice and Consent process. Those rules changed over time. The rule changes impacted the magnitude of the reward from cheating. That reward became much bigger. We need an explanation of that.”
“Okay, that makes sense.”
“During Obama’s first term, Senate approval of a Presidential nomination was subject to the Filibuster, which at the time required 60 votes to overcome. That’s a three fifths majority in the Senate. Earlier, the standard was a two thirds majority, an even higher bar to get over. Unless one party itself has such a majority, which rarely happens, this means that the nomination required crossover appeal to get through. The Republicans during Obama’s first term relied on the Filibuster to block many of his nominations, and not just for judicial appointments. The Obama administration became quite frustrated by the Republican obstruction. They put pressure on Harry Reid, then the Senate Majority Leader, to do something to fix the problem.
So in 2013, Democrats in the Senate led by Reid invoked the so-called Nuclear Option, which by a straight majority vote eliminated the Filibuster on all Presidential appointments except for the Supreme Court. In 2013 and 2014 this move achieved the desired result. The bulk of President Obama’s nominations in that time period were approved by the Senate. But then, in 2015 the Republicans were back in the Senate majority and they remained so after Trump was elected President.
The upshot is that the Republicans again blocked President Obama’s nominations, so many vacancies on lower courts remain unfilled. And utilizing the precedent of Reid invoking the Nuclear Option, McConnell was able to change the standard for approval of Supreme Court nominations to a simple majority. If you look at the appointees to the Supreme Court made by President Trump, none of them would have survived the Filibuster. They each got approved by a majority, but less than 60 votes.”
Caroline indicated one final point to be made here. “As long as Trump was nominating Conservative judges, Republicans in the Senate had incentive to look the other way at Trump’s own transgressions. Rather than Checks and Balances, which is how the system is supposed to work, the fix was in as a consequence of a rather unholy alliance.” Caroline stopped there.
Elena said, “This is a very powerful story to tell. If most Americans can learn this story fully, it will change how they think about politics in the present. Not only will it create a movement to reverse all the Trump judicial appointments, it will also generate a strong sentiment to move toward a truly bipartisan government. There is tyranny in having one party trying to dominate and totally ignore the wishes of the other.”
Then Jackie made a different point. “The story got more complex all of a sudden. I can understand the need for the added complexity, to make a full picture of what happened. But explaining it to others will be a challenge, particularly to those who aren’t used to hearing complex arguments.”
Elena said, “Having such a challenge as a writer will keep the work interesting. I’m in.”
Jackie said, “I’m in too.”
Caroline smiled. “Thank you. Let’s go to the front desk so you can fill out the paperwork to get paid.”
* * * * *
Jackie and Elena were each given a clipboard with a form on it. Caroline said the first paycheck would be sent electronically tomorrow. When they next talk they should confirm that they received payment. Date of birth was one of the pieces of information the form required. Caroline note that Jackie was 33, a few months older than her. Elena was 40. Caroline thought the age differential would make for an interesting organization dynamic.
Caroline said that she still had other writers to bring on board and she would like the group as a whole to decide whether to use pseudonyms or not. Then she mentioned the laptops and cell phones and that Michael needed to know which way we were going on this before the equipment is distributed. She hoped that by next week it would be resolved.
As they got up to leave Jackie gave a big hug to Caroline. Then Elena did likewise. It was a good evening. They all knew it.
After letting them out Caroline went back to conference room to clean up a bit. There were a couple of pieces of pizza left over. Caroline took a bite of one, thought better of it, and put the remains in the trash.
Comments
Post a Comment