In the United States, the power of the President is constrained by a large number of countervailing powers. A President who inclines toward authoritarianism can be held back by other elected officials, the judicial system, career bureaucrats, a free press, non-governmental organizations like universities and churches, and eventually, the people. We’ve seen this distributed power in action over the last year and a half. Now as California votes in a primary election, it’s imperative to make the most of our democratic power.
November 8, 2016, is one of those dates in history where you will always remember where you were.
Jim and I were at a party at the home of a couple who were members of the Los Angeles church I was serving at the time. There were about 30 of us there, a handful of church members, many other friends of the hosts. But everyone there to celebrate what we all assumed would be the election of the first woman President of the United States. I’d brought a bottle of champagne, as had others. The food looked great. The people were excited and friendly. It promised to be a great party. A great night for our country. The kind of moment you want to share.
I took a seat close to the television as the polls closed on the east coast and we started to get early returns. Very quickly it became apparent that something was clearly wrong. Virginia looked blue. But the states we had thought were likely blue, or at least toss-ups: Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, were all trending red. Ohio was solidly red. Before the polls closed in Michigan and Wisconsin, the result was clear. I didn’t need to see any more.
I felt a pit open in the bottom of my stomach, and then I started to fall into it. A man who I had known about for decades and known clearly as a charlatan and a clown, had been elected the next President of the United States. A man whose primary motivations in life seemed to be greed and self-agrandizement. A liar. A boaster. A man of no depth, or wisdom, or culture. A bad man as he had demonstrated throughout his career and proved during his campaign. Unfaithful to his wives, a cheat to his business partners, schooled by Roy Cohn (and enough said right there) who lost a fortune in real estate, then made it back pretending to be a mentor or a reality TV game show. An abuser of women. A trader in racist conspiracy theories. A smug and infantile creep. This person was to be our President? A man who was not only entirely unqualified for the office but a man who I had found to be personally despicable for years?
I told Jim we couldn’t stay. I said, “I can’t be around people right now.” I felt a panic, actually, that people might look to me to say something wise, or comforting, or hopeful. It was hard to be any of that even weeks later from the pulpit. I knew I couldn’t do it, then, from a living room with the news still unfolding on the TV behind us. I had no words. I felt such despair. I had no courage. I said goodbye to the host. She said she understood. Her husband had already abandoned the party and gone upstairs. Later, I learned that one of the other folks from the church who was there ended up leading the group in a prayer. I was so proud of her.
Jim and I went home to a sleepless night. Protests started that same evening. About 2pm we heard a lone man walking down Main Street in front of our apartment screaming, “Not my President.” The next day there were several groups of protestors marching on our street. You know how that went. Protest marches continued for months.
Perhaps you’re like me. For the first several months, maybe for the first year, I stayed heavily engaged in monitoring the ongoing travesty of this man and the wreck he is making of our country and of our civic and merely human values that I hold dear: the constant lying, the cruelty to vulnerable people, reckless and simply pointless destruction of Obama-era policy, enthusiastic support of the worst of our nature, and a limitless narcissism that manipulates the Presidency and its powers as a personal plaything.
But lately, maybe for the last six months or so, I ceased to be able to maintain the same level of shock and disgust. The behavior hasn’t gotten any better, the tweets are no less intemperate, the destruction continues apace. But it is exhausting, first of all; I can’t keep up. But, more healthfully, in the last six months, I’ve been able to turn toward a hopeful future.
The mid-term elections are coming.
I make no predictions about the outcome of those elections. After November 8, 2016, I’ve given up any notion that I can read the minds of the American electorate.
But the elections themselves are a sign of hope for me; a beacon, calling us forward, that once again, Americans will have a chance to speak and be heard in a powerful way. Even if that voice be misguided, as it has sometimes been in the past, that we have that voice is something to be cherished. In an era when so many of our democratic norms are being subverted and dismantled, we can vote. When even our ability to vote is threatened, restricted, denied, gerrymandered to irrelevancy, or hacked by a foreign power, the right to vote is more precious than ever, and the best way to preserve our voting right is to use our right.
I don’t need to tell this crowd to vote. The use of the democratic process is the fifth of the seven principles of our faith. Voting is part of the culture of Unitarian Universalists. We vote. We feel it a duty to vote, an honor and a moral commandment. Of course you will vote in November. Of course you will vote on Tuesday.
And I hope that you will, as I will, on Tuesday, feel that you’re voting on Tuesday is one of the strongest and most effective ways of expressing your resistance to the abuse of power and wayward policy of the current administration. The President’s name is not on the ballot. But what you will vote for and who you will vote for creates a piece of the framework of government within which the President operates. It is imperative, as the President flails in his office smashing everything close enough to smash, that the governmental framework that surrounds him be as secure as we can make it.
My despair after the November 2016 elections lasted for a couple of months. I worked with my congregation at the time to find some small courage and comfort for them and myself. But it really wasn’t until January of 2017, that I found a helpful truth that rebuilt, if not my confidence, at least my hope, for America’s ability to withstand the coming assault of this Presidency.
In January 2017, I heard a speech given by Bill Schulz, the former President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, who later became the head of the American branch of Amnesty International, and after that the head of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. Dr. Schulz was speaking at our Unitarian Universalist seminary in Chicago, Meadville Lombard, at what they called their Convocation. I had a student intern at the time who was studying at Meadville so I was invited to attend the event.
Interestingly, although the convocation happened just two months after the elections, the theme of the convocation, the Rise of Global Authoritarianism, had been chosen long before. That fact alone encouraged us to put what was happening in the United States into a larger perspective.
And Dr. Schulz’s talk, further, helpfully, put the office of the Presidency into a larger perspective. Dr. Schulz laid out a list of what he called, “Countervailing Powers” that constrain, resist, or even refute the power of the President. Even when the same political party is in power in the White House, the Senate and the House, there are other political players. Bill Schulz’s listed six powers that can stand in defense of democracy when the President seems determined to destroy it and Congress seems willing to go along.
Number one is the Federal Bureaucracy. We don’t usually think of bureaucracy as a efficient good. But remember this. The Federal Government is not just the politicians that we elect, or the positions that Trump appoints. The Federal Government is approximately 2.8 million staff positions, not including the military. 2.8 million people who do the jobs of running the government and whose careers continue whoever is in power. They don’t stop doing their jobs, or immediately do them differently, just because there’s a new administration.
Number two is the Judicial System. Presidents get to appoint judges who are supposed to be nonpartisan, but in any case they don’t lose their jobs just because the President leaves office. It’s true that McConnell was able to hold open a Supreme Court seat for more than a year so that Trump could fill it, but very few cases make it to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, thousands of lower court judges are still on their benches providing a countervailing power against the hateful and unconstitutional policy coming from Washington.
The third countervailing power is the media. The free press. A public voice of facts and critique. We have newspapers. We have journalists. We have courageous citizens determined to provide a strong, objective, honest, fearless, countervailing power against the lies and distortions of the President.
Number four is NGOS. Non-Governmental Organizations. Think of the ACLU. Think of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The Southern Poverty Law Center. The NAACP.
Number five is religious and academic communities. We have power in this room. We are organized. We have guiding principles. We are part of a network of Unitarian Universalists extending throughout the country. Religious and academic institutions have the power to speak out, to say the truth, to inspire, to lead. Churches in particular are the creators of civic culture. We can preach about the immorality of the President’s personal life and his public policy, and we can help shape the public response to those failings.
Which brings me, finally, to the last on Schulz’s list, the sixth countervailing power: the people. You and me. Us. We, through activism, advocacy, the ballot box, the mailbox, the street, the tweet, through our organizations and our organizing, our dollars, our hollers, over coffee with friends, over the coffee table with family, around the coffee pot in the breakroom with co-workers, from the bumper sticker on the back of your car, to the slogan on the back of your tee shirt, to the way we refuse to become hateful or mean or selfish or discouraged when the currently elected politicians strategize to turn Americans against each other, and America against the world, we can hold up and eventually turn around the backward direction of our nation.
Dr. Schulz also briefly mentioned the many elected state and local officials that also form a kind of countervailing power against the Federal government. As we have certainly been aware in California over the last year and a half, the ability of your city to assist or resist Federal Immigration policy, or the State to assist or resist deregulation of Federal environmental policies to use just two examples show that not only Presidential elections but all elections have enormous consequences for the well-being of our nation and our citizens.
On your ballot on Tuesday will be the names of 27 candidates for Governor. The top two will be on the ballot in November. Who we elect as Governor of California makes an extraordinary difference.
We are voting for many other Statewide offices, Lieutenant Governor, Secretary of State, Controller, Treasurer. The person in the Attorney General’s office will have a major influence on holding our Federal government accountable to its constitutional obligations.
There are 32 people running for United States Senator.
Depending on where you live you may be asked to consider crucial primary contests for United States Representatives the determine which two names will be on the November ballot.
If you care about the persons who sit on Superior Court benches, or oversee our public school classrooms, or our county sheriff’s office, this is the time to make your voice heard.
And there are five State Measures on Tuesday’s ballot. As a church we can’t advocate for particular candidates, that’s your choice following your sense of where our faith principles should guide you. But if you want my personal opinion about the five ballot measures, I’m voting: Yes, Yes, No, Yes and Yes.
In the last week of his Presidency, Obama gave a farewell address in Chicago. As had been a common theme of his throughout his Presidency he encouraged Americans to claim their power as citizens, and accept our responsibility to be active participants in our democracy. He said:
“Our Constitution is a remarkable, beautiful gift. But it’s really just a piece of parchment. It has no power on its own. We, the people, give it power – with our participation, and the choices we make. Whether or not we stand up for our freedoms. Whether or not we respect and enforce the rule of law. America is no fragile thing. But the gains of our long journey to freedom are not assured.”
Obama was speaking of the sixth countervailing power. The people. He ended his farewell speech with these words:
“Ultimately, that’s what our democracy demands. It needs you. Not just when there’s an election, not just when your own narrow interest is at stake, but over the full span of a lifetime. If you’re tired of arguing with strangers on the Internet, try to talk with one in real life. If something needs fixing, lace up your shoes and do some organizing. If you’re disappointed by your elected officials, grab a clipboard, get some signatures, and run for office yourself. Show up. Dive in. Persevere.”
Another President once said, in a speech over the battlefield in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, “We highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Lincoln adapted that definition of democracy from a phrase coined by the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, who defined democracy as “government of all, by all, for all.”
For this democracy, this nation, to truly belong to the people, we must claim it as ours, and defend it against usurpers. We are not alone. We stand with government workers, judges, the free press, independent organizations, and stewards of our culture like this community. It is precisely because these institutions pose a real threat to the President’s abuse that he attacks them so persistently. They are with us. They encourage us. But eventually it is us, we the people, who must do the work of preserving democracy.
Tuesday, perhaps in a small way, perhaps ultimately in a more consequential way than we can imagine, we shall begin “a new birth of freedom” for all, but only if comes of all, and by all.