Going With The Flow

Cheryl Then

Cheryl Now

When I was a fourth year medical student I was acting as a "Sub intern" on a medical ward, a sort of audition for internship at The New York Hospital. In those days, internships at the New York Hospital, a gleaming white palace on the chic upper East Side, were not easy to earn and you had to do six weeks where you were watched by real interns, resident and faculty. If you did well, you had a good chance of landing a spot among the thirty medical interns who were selected from Johns Hopkins Medical School, Harvard, Columbia and Cornell. 
It all made American Idol look like pretty tepid competition
One day,  I was getting bombed with admissions. The admitting intern on each ward worked up every admission coming to the floor, usually from the Emergency Room, from seven in the morning until seven the next morning. Every admission was a ton of work, and if the ER admitted twenty patients over a 24 hour period, you got five admissions, which was about all you could really do over 24 hours because each patient took at least two hours, usually three and you had all the patients who were already in ward beds to take care of, not to mention obligations to go to radiology rounds, chart rounds, ward rounds, attending rounds. So you were pretty strung out on admitting days.


So this morning we got two "hits" at once, a rare thing. The ER called and said there were two patients who needed to be admitted. We knew nothing about them except one was named Gertrude and one was named Karen. One of the other interns, who was not on call for admissions that day,  took pity on me and offered to take one of the admissions. "Okay," I said, you take Karen, I'll get  Gertrude."  He was doing me a big favor, so I took Gertrude who had to be at least 80, just by the name,  and Karen might be, well, younger.


As it turned out, Gertrude was 93 and had a urinary tract infection which had become blood borne: She was septic, delirious and a "train wreck."  


Karen turned out to be 24, an Eileen Ford model with aseptic meningitis. 


My fellow intern was grinning and singing, "No good deed goes unrewarded." He was actually happy, which medical interns rarely are. I was his new instant best friend. I had given him Karen.
Of course, the ward nurses quickly came to hate Karen. All the medical students and interns and residents found reasons to float by her bed, just to be sure she was doing well, to be sure she had enough pain relief, had got her breakfast on time, to be sure the light, which bothered her eyes, was not too bright, the blinds drawn.


The nurses were rolling their eyes and groaning. "I used to respect these guys," one said. "Now look at them, falling all over themselves like fools."


The next day, I was no longer on call, and I had been up 36 hours and was waiting for chart rounds to begin, because once they were over around 6 PM, I could finally go home and crash. 
My head was splitting with a blinding migraine. I felt grubby and crawly. I hadn't shaved and my spotless "whites" were now besotted with urine, blood, a little vomit here and there and I can only imagine how I stank. I was leaning up against the nurse's station desk, alone on the ward, waiting for interns and residents to start filtering back to the ward, looking down to the far end of the ward hall,  and I saw a figure come through the door moving toward me.


She was definitely not an intern or a nurse. She walked with wonderful grace, in tight jeans and a T shirt. She was carrying a bunch of wrapped flowers and she was coming straight toward me. 
She was the most beautiful woman I had ever, have ever, personally laid eyes upon. 
"Let me guess," I said to her, when she finally reached the nurse's station. "You're here to see Karen."
"Yes," she said, with an impossibly deeply dimpled smile. 
"How did I ever know?" I mumbled to myself and led her down to Karen's room. I asked her to wait at the door. It was a four bed room and I had to check everyone was dressed or behind pulled curtains and I wanted to be sure Karen was awake.
"You've got a friend," I told Karen. "Off hand, a wild guess. She's  from Eileen Ford."
"Oh, it's Cheryl," Karen said. "Show her in."
So I showed in Cheryl Tiegs, and she thanked me with a flashing smile and I left to go to chart rounds.


I never saw Cheryl again, but I ran into Karen quite a lot, in one of those strange New York City things, where you just keep bumping into someone on the street or in the convenience store.  Karen had shown no interest in the male medicos who were falling all over themselves on the ward, but she was always very nice to me.
One of the residents told me later told me Karen had asked about me, whether I had a girlfriend. He said I had missed my chance with her.  She was lovely, but my life was just too complicated at that time. 
Besides, I thought, beautiful women like that are just so...besieged. She ultimately married one of the gynecologists on staff, a guy twenty years her senior. 


A couple of years later,  I met Karen at Penn Station. She was married by then, wearing a ring on her left hand which might have financed a fleet of yachts,  and the topic turned to Cheryl and what had happened to her. 
"Why didn't you ever ask her out?" Karen asked.
"Oh, right," I said. "Between Sports Illustrated cover shots, she would have needed a clip board to look up some young doctor she had met on the ward at New York Hospital."
"You never know," Karen said. "I wound up with a doctor."


I thought about Cheryl Tiegs. She was exactly my age. She had moved from California to New York and her career had exploded. She was flown all over the world, paid immense money to smile into the camera and she was told constantly she was a superstar. And I thought about what her life must have been like. She made her career on being  among the most visually beautiful women of her generation. And beyond the career and the money, a beautiful woman in New York City is constantly pursued by men who are rich, powerful, charismatic.  What must that do to you?


The arc of my life, the arc of the life of any doctor or engineer or lawyer, is one of slowly building strength, of humiliation, humility, keeping your head down, moving forward painfully, slowly, soldiering through mistakes and growing and persisting, moving forward.
The longer I stayed in the hospital, the more I had begun to look at women differently, as I moved through medical training. Good looks were nice, but women who were really competent, brave, kind became more interesting. 


Cheryl is no longer twenty four. She's forty years older. Still beautiful, but what does a woman whose life is about visual beauty do as she ages and those qualities start to fade?  If your main pleasure in life, if your sense of personal potency has been turning heads, causing a commotion in every room simply by walking into it, what happens when that is lost and you become relatively invisible? How do you move from deriving pleasure from something so deeply embedded in your psyche to deriving new pleasures elsewhere?
Or is that what aging is all about--transforming your mind to derive satisfaction from new places?
And, when it comes to women,  I think again of that deep, abiding truth, from the movie Roger Rabbit when Eddie asks Jessica Rabbit, that femme fatale,  what she sees in Roger the cartoon rabbit. "He makes me laugh," Jessica says.
And that's as good an answer as I've ever heard.

Belief Systems

The fox is very clever and knows many things; the hedgehog knows only one thing, but it is a big thing.

Okay, I admit it, this is going to be a blog of free association. But if you cannot ruminate on a blog, what is left?

Nicholas Lemann got me going with his review of books about the unequal distribution of wealth in the United States, in the April 23rd New Yorker.

As I read through this, various images popped into my field of vision. But, if you are like the hedgehog and you want the one big thing to tie all this together, it would be that people believe what they want to believe for their own reasons and then they use numbers, and statistics to make these beliefs sound more respectable and convincing to others.

This idea was explored a week or two ago in the New York Times Review of Books about "reasoning" and how we come to our own beliefs. What I got out of all that was something I have come to understand through years at my own journal club, where we review articles in the medical literature, about things like whether T cells are good for killing malignant tumors, or whether or not a given drug will benefit diabetics or whether fiber in foods can prevent colon cancer. There is always a background reason the study was done--somebody has tenure riding on the outcome, or some drug company stands to make money. Even in this arena, where you would think people could be disinterested, doing the experiment and letting the facts lead them where they may--no, all too often there are unseen reasons for the author to want to come to a particular conclusion.

More dramatically, and far more obvious has been the United States Supreme Court, where for years, the "judgments" are forgone conclusions. No one has ever answered my question, posed many times on this blog: If you can read a one paragraph description of any case with significant social implications, and you can predict with 95% accuracy how 8 of the 9 justices will vote, how much could the law be guiding the process and how much of all this is simply people circling around back to their own dearly held beliefs?  For the Court, these beliefs usually come down to   the importance of maintaining order in society versus the rights of the individual to dissent.

So here we have a spate of books considering the distribution of wealth in the USA. One thing nobody seems to dispute is the pie graphs showing huge slices of wealth and income (not necessarily the same thing) belonging to small numbers of people in the USA, and a distribution of wealth we used to associate with countries like Brazil and Argentina.

The first question is: Is this a bad thing, a social or national ill?

The next question is: How did/does this happen?

The last question is: If it is a bad thing, what can/should be done to fix it?

Timothy Noah has written The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We can Do About It. He notes 93% of the gains in wealth since 2010 went to the richest 1% of the population. He points out that when people do express outrage at this, they tend to blame the government.

Charles Murray says in Coming Apart:The State of White America, 1960-2010 that the lower income part of our population has been imprisoned, divorced, jobless and having children out of wedlock at substantially higher rates over the past decade. Poor people have lost the ethic of work and family, he says, and in prior books he blamed this on a government program, Aid to Dependent Children, which no longer exists. 
So now Murray says the reason for the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer is the rich are hardworking, dedicated to their children and see no connection or obligation to those who are failing and falling behind. Trying to shift resources away from the elite is doomed to failure because this is a case f the cream rising to the top. It's the old British thing: successful people are successful because they are the elect; they are destined by genes to do better; they are chosen by God to pull that sword out of the stone and to go forth and rule over the dominion, just as man is meant to rule over cows and pigs and to eat them.
 If there is a solution, Murray says, it's for the non elite, (those failing, jobless, divorced poor) to get better values.

Murray describes the super elite as living in Chevy Chase, Maryland (and places like it) obsessing over what schools their children will go it. From the upper West Side of Manhattan to Shaker Heights to Scarsdale and Darien, we have high IQ people who've met other high IQ people at elite colleges, breeding and producing highly gifted children who are driven to succeed. They will marry, not divorce, remodel their kitchens and suck up the great part of the nation's wealth. All this is as it should be and we couldn't change it if we tried.

When I look at Chevy Chase, and its sister communities, places I know well, that is not an unfair description. 
And when I look at the folk I now live among, people from families of eight, whose parents never finished high school, or did just barely and got jobs in factories which no long exist in New Hampshire, or, if they were lucky, they  got federal jobs at the Portsmouth shipyard, got married before age twenty, had five kids, got divorced, lost their jobs. The lives of the lower 80% in New Hampshire sure do look different from the lives of the people living in the 20815 zip code of Chevy Chase.

I once wandered through a State University of New York campus at New Platz and chatted with students and listened to them and I thought, with considerable disquietude, "This is where the C students wind up." And it was a very depressing experience. The vitality and the energy of the Ivy League campuses, where people felt they were winning and, if they kept trying, were destined to live great lives, were conspicuously absent at New Paltz.

And you have to wonder, how is it Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg both wound up at Harvard?

Was there some way of identifying these people who would pull the sword out of the stone? Are SAT exams really that good?
And how does Stanford pick all those winners?

By this line of thinking, the successful are successful for Identifiable  reasons; conversely the failures are failures for the same reasons.

David Rothkopft in Power, Inc. doesn't believe success is all nature and no nurture. He says the reason some succeed is the winners had been able to change the rules of the game once they win, and they can then ensure their ongoing success and they can ensure the  failure of others. 
 It goes beyond the experience of the board game Monopoly, where everyone plays the game by the rules but some people gain an advantage and use that to put hotels on Boardwalk and then suck the money from those who land on their space and use their early success to bleed others dry. It is more a case of the winners having changed the rules so they get to roll the dice twenty times before their competitors get a chance to roll even once. 
 In Rothkopft's analysis, supercitizens (multinational corporations, global corporations) have become more powerful than governments and take over control of the parts of governments most useful to them and change the rules to ensure their continued success.

Rothkopft's solution is for government to refuse to allow the rules to be changed to ensure the success of the supercitizens, and in fact to change the rules to allow the downtrodden a better chance. Of course, this brings to mind Affirmative Action, an anathema to Justice Clarence Thomas and his three like minded colleagues, not to mention Rush Limbaugh.

Tony Judt in Ill Fares the Land argues the rise and domination of the one percenters did not occur because they were God's elect, or because they were selected by natural selection of the most brilliant or because it was inevitable cream would rise to the top. In fact, looking at a time when income and wealth were distributed more evenly, this was a time when government vigorously supported health care, old age pensions, public transportation and education. Government created a rising tide which lifted all boats, not a tsunami which sent some boats soaring to safe high peaks and swamped everyone else.

David Cost sees government as an inevitable failure machine, in Spoiled Rotten: How the Politics of Patronage Corrupted the Once Noble Democratic Party and Now Threatens the American Republic. For him, government always does great damage. It's easy to understand the argument, which has some merit but not all that much. Daniel Patrick Moynahan had a subtle enough mind to see the problems with the welfare system as it had evolved until the Clinton presidency.

I saw what he saw in an inner city clinic where 13 year old girls came to clinic pregnant and when I asked them how they planned to raise the child, they shrugged and said, "Welfare." The new baby was handed off not to grandmother, who was 20 something and had a government job to go to, but to great grand mother who was 46 and living at home on welfare and getting government pay outs to provide care to her great grandchild's new baby. When the government rules changed, that sort of behavior was no longer a good financial option and abortion rates rose.

So where does all this leave me, you and me?

The easiest thing is to say, well, it's all written. Those low IQ people we meet every day in New Hampshire will have 8 kids they cannot educate or adequately support and they will live lives of failure, in mobile homes, in and out of jobs. At best, they'll marry and stay married to their childhood sweet hearts and they'll be reasonably content living on Social Security, listening to Rush Limbaugh every day, convincing them they are superior to the liberal elite snobs who have kept them down.

The harder thing would be to say, we've got to do something to change the lot of the losers. But changing the lot of the losers is hard and often perilous and full of risk and discord. Changing the lot of the slaves, the biggest losers in the history of the Americas (next to the Indians), took a Civil War. Changing the lot of the descendants of those slaves tore the nation apart in the 1960's, a hundred years later.

It's so much easier to just let the winners be winners and the losers losers. Everyone knows his place.

I remember all those arguments occurring on campus in the mid 60's when some of my professors argued if you try to change things, if you try to integrate restaurants, to allow Negroes to eat at lunch counters next to whites, to use white only bathrooms, to go to college, to move into white only neighborhoods, to marry white women, to get jobs in police and fire departments, to become officers in the military, why then the expectations of the Negro will soar, and, inevitably, they'll be disappointed and they will explode.

Of course, it was not the Negroes who exploded when they got all that. It was the Whites who found their own position had changed.

That story of the white farmer who shot the mule of his Black neighbor stays with me. The Black farmer got a new mule and with that mule he was able to plow straight rows and grow more corn and cotton than the white farmer. So the white farmer took his gun and sot the Black farmer's mule. When the white farmer's son asked why he had done that the white farmer replied, "If I ain't no better than a nigger, then what am I?"

So, all these authors have looked at details and come to the conclusions they started out to prove. 
For me it's this: The world is a better place when we make efforts to help those who have been the losers. It's not as comfortable and it's not an unalloyed success when you try to change the lot of other people, but, over time, I'd much rather live in the integrated United States of American than the racially segregated America I grew up in. And I'm grateful there was a City College of New York which allowed my first generation immigrant parents to get a college education and to assimilate into America. When they went to CCNY, the glittering prizes still went to the children of parents who went to Harvard, Yale and Princeton, but college still made a difference to the first generation who went to CCNY.

Change toward equality made this country a better place.

And as nasty and blood stained as our nation's history is, it still gives me a chill to think no other nation in the history of the planet ever fought a Civil War on the scale we did to raise up an underclass they way we did. People have argued that's not what motivated Northerners to fight. But I'll take Lincoln at his word when he remarked in his Second Inaugural address that the slaves, ultimately were the cause of the war. And he remarked, on the occasion of the visit of Harriet Beecher Stowe to the White House, leaning down from his six foot height to shake the hand of the diminutive author of Uncle Tom's Cabin

"So this is the little lady, who wrote the book, that started the great big war."

What other country can say that? That is the big thing.

Waking Up to A Different World

The world has changed this morning in America.

It's taken a few days to sink in, but this is not the same country.

I know, there were worse times, when black men were lynched in the South, when signs appeared in windows of stores in Boston: No Irish Need Apply, when witches were burned in Salem, when young men from the American heartland were dying in the rice paddies of Vietnam, when the flower of American youth was sent off to die in the trenches in France for no good reason, when slaves were sold and beaten and murdered. This is a country drenched in blood and hypocrisy and this is a country where power gets entrenched and exacts its pound of flesh.

Yes, there was Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was followed by adoring masses in his phony search for Communists in the government.

Yes, there is the moronic Sarah Palin and the seething Rush Limbaugh.
But you could always say, well, there will always be fringe crazies.

But in my lifetime at least, there has not been a time when the Supreme Court has been so brazenly a force of suppression of the weak and powerless and a tool of the powerful and wealthy.

But when you look at that Supreme Court, you see we have a new Dred Scott Supreme Court, one which can look at the most egregious oppressors and find only sympathy for the forces of order and punishment.

This is a court which would, if we had slavery today, embrace it as important for maintaining order.

Today we wake up and know if our sisters or daughters or wives are arrested for jaywalking or for littering or pulled over for a broken tail light and brought to jail, they can be strip searched, told to squat and cough, have their orifices probed, all by order of the Supreme Court of the United States.

And these are people who have not been tried, not been found guilty of anything.

Merely arrested.

And is there an outcry from the populace over this incendiary ruling?

We have seen powers which would make the Gestapo blush, and are there protests in the street or in Boston harbor?

Are plans made, options discussed for removing the usurpers?

No. We are, it must be admitted, a nation of sheep.

We claim to be heirs to the founding fathers--to Franklin and Jefferson and Adams. They would gasp at our indolence, our torpor, our inertia. They would be ashamed of the people we have become.

We will allow our loved ones to be led to the slaughter and we'll turn on American Idol or some hockey game.

It won't me, not my daughter. They only do that to Black guys or terrorists.

There was a great scene in Band of Brothers, where Private David Webster points his service .45 in the face of a baker in a village which was just outside a concentration camp. The baker claims he didn't know what went on in the concentration camp.
"Didn't know?" Webster sputters. "It's less than half a mile away. When the winds shifted you had to smell it from here!"
That's where we are today, just outside the concentration camp.
We know it's there, but we don't want to smell it.

The Problem of the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court has ruled this week to allow strip searches in police stations at the will of the police.

They accrue some arguments to support this stunning decision, but the basic truth is this 5 man majority court will rule for those in power, whether they be the police or the rich or the politically powerful no matter what the case or the cause.

They have become a 5 man junta.

Now, I realize, when the Supreme Court ruled to allow abortion as a right guaranteed by the implied privacy right found in the Constitution, the Reactionary Right was livid and calling for the impeachment of the justices. When they ruled that the doctrine "Separate but equal" was a non sequitur because separate meant inherently unequal, the Right was appalled and they railed against judicial activism and the over ruling of laws enacted by elected officials by an unelected group of elitist men.

But in these cases, the fact is, the elected officials who had voted for laws were a majority only in a narrow sense: They were a majority in a particular conservative state or they were a majority only in the Jim Crow South, so the Supreme Court was reflecting a national consensus in each case.

And they did something in each case which moved the country in the right direction.

In the case of Roe vs Wade they moved women out of back alleys and into safe clinics. They did not end the fight over abortion, but they protected women's lives until the people's representatives could act. The problem is, of course, the people's representatives have been too afraid to act, and so the country has remained in limbo. Polls suggest if the right to abortion were ever put to a nation wide referendum, it would be legalized but neither those who oppose it nor those who would protect it want to vote on this issue. For the opponents of abortion, they fear a vote because the numbers suggest they would lose, and it has been more useful to them in terms of money and jobs to have a dragon to slay. For the supporters of "Choice" there is the fear of a well organized minority, which has a greater sense of grievance, winning at the polls, where only 40% of the electorate would bother to turn out, and it would be the most fired up 40%.

The fact is, nobody is actually "for" abortion. There are those who think it murder and those who wish it never had to be done, but are willing to accept it, as a last, sad resort.

With respect to Brown, well, that was part of a past of which we can be happy--a deep wrong was righted and Blacks and Whites both benefited. We have a society which is far less overtly racist than it was in the 1950's.

But now we have the demon seed of George W. Bush, in the form of these five Republican justices, Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts and Kennedy, whose votes are so predictable and pernicious as to constitute a threat to ever making progress in this country.

You can say, well, if the Democrats could only win enough support, the Supreme Court will be irrelevant--pass a single payer or extend Medicare to everyone and the Supreme Court will have no case to rule on--until Medicare itself becomes a court case. And how do you think these five will vote then?

The point is, we do not have to tolerate this ring through the nose of the Republic. Article III of the Constitution is very brief in its description of the Supreme Court. It says only justices shall serve as long as they show "good Behaviour." What that means is anyone's guess and has only rarely been tested. We have accepted life terms for the justices and a lack of impeachment by tradition. Even Franklin Roosevelt, in the perilous times of the Depression, with a solid majority behind him could not get the support he needed to "pack" the court, i.e., to simply add enough justices to out vote those who stood in his way.

I would like to think there is more appetite now to bring this set of 5 angry men to justice. They are a tiny cabal of misanthropy and authoritarians who ought to be vanquished.

One of them, Scalia, claims to channel the founding fathers for his opinions: Well, let him channel Jefferson, who believed the country would always need a "little revolution now and then."

Let us have the same courage to change things Jefferson and Franklin and Adams had.

Let us identify perfidy and arrogance next to which King George III is a piker, and let us through off the chains of our more recent King George the W, and rid ourselves of these scoundrels.

Let's impeach the 5 of them, or pack the court with 5 more liberal justices and let's pass a term limit, say 6 years for each and let us change this country.

Of course, you'd need some Democratic majorities in the House and Senate to do all this, but we can all work on that, to save the country.

The Supreme Court is Political: Who wuddah thunk?

This morning, Paul Krugman, the economist, wrote that the Supreme Court appears to be basing its decisions on politics.

Ya think?

This insight has come as a shocking conclusion to many of my friends, especially the lawyers among my friends.

I don't know what they do to people in law school. Somehow people come out of law school with the idea that a dispassionate, rational self guides Supreme Court justices toward a ruling based on law rather than on personal convictions about what's right.

In past posts, I've talked about the time I was put on a jury hearing a case of someone accused of selling marijuana and I told the judge I couldn't find the guy guilty, even if they proved he did sell it, because I didn't think marijuana ought to be illegal in the first place.

The judge smiled and asked me, "If the state could prove to your satisfaction, this defendant did in fact sell marijuana, could you find that he did?"

I said, "Yes," and I was on the jury.

That is the sort of dispassionate decision making we ask of the Supreme Court, but the cases are not so straightforward: Did a transaction occur? Is there enough evidence to persuade you this man did sell, despite all his protestations to the contrary?

But in the case of Dred Scott, the question is: Is a slave a human being? Well, you have to go back to basics, and basically, the Supreme Court in those days said a slave is not a human being in the eyes of the law, but only property.

Now, today's Supreme Court says a company is a human being.

And it will say a mandate to either buy health insurance or pay a fine is forcing a citizen into a commercial act which he does not want to do, and constitutes an unjustifiable taking of freedom and liberty.

It would be perfectly okay to take that citizen's money if you simply make it a tax. But not if you make him buy something.

This is cagey politics: Okay, if you have enough support among the constituents to support such a tax, pass that tax. But if support is so fragile it would melt away if you call it a tax, well then you cannot have your law.

So, the Supreme Court justices are politicians, playing out their assigned roles as right wingers, just as the left wingers play out their roles.

Let's admit what we've got and stop pretending.

Let's stop looking at naked power politics and stop seeing the Emperor's clothes.

I do feel like the child along the road, with all my lawyer friends saying, "Oh, aren't those robes just beautiful? Look how these guys can reason, using only the law to guide them."

And I've been saying--check it out--for years: We've got political appointees acting like political appointees.

Only, they do this for life terms.

Let's think again about changing all this. The Supreme Court, the Scalia Court, in all it's smugness and snarling piousness is what it is.

Have we not reached a point where we need to brave up and change it?

How They Do It

Every once in a while, I get an insight.

Sometimes this comes in the form of an NPR report which tells me something about the mechanics of a world about which I know very little.
Actually, this time it was two reports, in tandem.
The first report was about a Congressman who was slugging it out with his Republican opponent, but in the last three weeks of his campaign, he was swamped by a campaign of saturation advertising. The ads had one of those deep movie ad voices, "In a world where Obamacare rules..."And the ad was all about what a terrible person this poor Democrat was.
The money for the ad came from a Super PAC, over $600,000. In the small market which comprised his district, that was enough to carpet bomb his district with wall to wall TV and radio ads.
The Democrat did not have that kind of money, and even if he had, he would not have been able to buy the air time, which was already bought up by the Super PAC.

He got clobbered.

Next report, an interview with Norm Orenstein of a conservative think tank. He explained how the Super PACs run the Congressmen. The term in the House of Representatives is two years, which means you start raising money for your next election, the day you win your election. You walk across the street from the Rayburn Office Building, so you leave government property and your Congressional office, and you walk into the private building--each party has one--and you make phone calls, sometimes two hours, sometime eleven hours a day, asking people for money.
But some part of the day, you sit in your office. A man from a Super PAC shows up and says, "The Super PAC I represent would really like you to vote for this amendment. They would be very disappointed in you if you do not." He will not tell you who is in this Super PAC. He just tells you how he wants you to vote.
You know if you cross the Super PAC they will likely dump $600,000 worth of commercials into your district the last two weeks of your next campaign and you will not be able to even find a spot for your rebuttal commercials.
And you think, "Well, it's just one amendment."
So you have just voted for an exemption to a tax on oil drilling in the Gulf, or to kill a wind farm or to allow a deduction on income taxes for automobiles which cost more than $80,000 or for yachts.
That's how money runs Washington.
It's all legal.
It's all protected by the Supreme Court, Justices Alito, Roberts, Scalia and Thomas. How much more legal could that be?


PS: I've just re read Article III, "The judicial Power of the United States shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish."
Nowhere can I find anything that says there shall be only 9 justices or that they must have lifetime appointments.
They shall hold their offices during good behavior.
But that doesn't mean they cannot be relieved of their offices except for bad behavior.
Franklin Roosevelt tried to add to the number of Supreme Court Justices. Congress wouldn't go along. But he pointed out those nine old men were standing in the way of economic recovery and he was a leader. He said, I can make these guys irrelevant by adding nine more, of my choosing, who can out vote them.
We don't have to pass Constitutional amendments, which is nigh on impossible. We have only to thwart those reactionary justices as they have thwarted us.
Of course, this could be a game of escalation: Obama appoints 9, so then there are 18 justices. Then the next time a Republican wins, he appoints 9 more and it's a game of escalation until there are as many justices as Congressmen.
But if Obama had enough support in Congress, he could at least make the noises, maybe bump it up by three--A dozen jurors, a dozen justices. Then let the game play out.
If we managed to get the Congress we need this next election, that's something we should keep in mind.