letter to Democrats in the House<\/a>, she writes (in part) \u201cour Caucus will continue to forcefully respond\u201d and \u201cPlease join us in supporting a forthcoming resolution sponsored by Congressman Tom Malinowski, who was born abroad, and Congressman Jamie Raskin, along with other Democratic Members\u201d. I admire Speaker Pelosi immensely, but I'd rather see the House as an institution<\/i> respond to this as an institutional attack, which it seems to me it obviously is.\r\nPerhaps I am wrong\u2014this is, after all, a President who says racist stuff all the time, leading a Party that has relied on racial resentment for as long as I\u2019ve been politically aware. Maybe we should be looking at this as a personal attack, not an institutional one. I believe that Our Only President doesn\u2019t appreciate any difference. But I think there is one.\r\n
On some level, it doesn\u2019t much matter if the President of the United States is, in his heart, a racist or not. It doesn\u2019t even matter very much if the President of the United States vilifies Americans in racist terms (and\/or highly gendered ones). It\u2019s unpleasant, and there\u2019s nothing good about it, but the damage done is largely superficial and personal. The policies that ruin people\u2019s lives are far more important than the words on his phone, much less the feeling in his guts. So if you take this bit of filth as one with the others, it is enough for individuals to repudiate it, for their own self-respect. But also matters if the institutions of the government are in some sort of balance. It matters that the House and the Senate are willing to politically act in their own interest. It matters when the Senate sits idly while the President replaces confirmed appointees with unconfirmed acting ones, or when the Executive advises its people to defy legislative subpoenas. And it will matter if the House treats this insult to its Members as an individual matter, not an institutional one.\r\n
I\u2019m going to connect this to another thing\u2014several friends of mine have, on occasion, mockingly referred to Our Only President by his grandfather\u2019s birth name, criticized the immigration status of his wives and children, and joked about deporting him. Now, I find that offensive, and I have objected to it on several occasions. But my friends are private individuals, and whether it\u2019s in conversation or in the semi-public arena of the internet, their behavior reflects on them as individuals, and is subject therefore to their own judgment. I mean, that stuff does in fact ripple through our culture; I\u2019m not saying that people shouldn\u2019t be held to a high standard by the community for the damage done to the community. I\u2019m saying that I would hold them to a standard as individuals, and I consider their insults to immigrants to be insulting to me as an individual and to immigrants and their descendants as a class (a rather large class). And it strikes me as a very different<\/i> thing when the President of the United states says that his political opponents in Congress should go back to where they came from. That seems like an institutional issue.\r\n
And if it isn\u2019t an institutional issue, then it\u2019s pretty much the same thing as my obnoxious friends, isn\u2019t it? The obnoxious stuff that the President says is important because of his office. The obnoxious stuff that the President says about Members of the House are important because of their offices. The person in the White House has never accepted the notion that becoming President naturally means giving up some of a private individual\u2019s leeway, or so it seems. It\u2019s important, then, to remember that it does\u2014that the President has not just the power of his office but its responsibility as well. That\u2019s why I want the House to respond as an institution, to make it clear that this is not just some guy, however famous, taking ignorant cheap shots at people who he dislikes and who dislike him. When, someday, this historical moment is no longer now<\/i> but then<\/i>, and there are different people in all those offices, the institutions will still matter. I hope.\r\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger proposes that this House should take offense and give censure.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[202,204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-item","category-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20089","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20089"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20089\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20092,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20089\/revisions\/20092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}