Education on the Brink. Transparency Too.

The US and Ukraine and A Blow to Democratic Rule

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON | FEB 24, 2025

I have this rule.

When something is said or done that hurts or angers, I hold off any response for 24 hours, knowing full well that I probably don’t have enough information or the placidity to make a reasoned judgment. It’s tough. In this day and age, it is a rule that begs to be broken.

I invoked the rule last week when President Donald Trump let loose on Ukraine and looked like he was gift-wrapping the country for his friend Russian President Vladimir Putin’s birthday. I couldn’t believe my ears, so I waited not 24 hours but 48. In the meantime, I read a variety of perspectives from right to left. I researched Ukrainian history and slowly replaced emotion with reason. But it didn’t change my mind.

Trump’s actions on Ukraine are unnerving and to some extent just plain scary, made more so by the disturbing trends taking place on the domestic front in just the first weeks of the second Trump term.

A case in point: Trump recently said that his swordsman, Elon Musk, isn’t aggressive enough. I hope that was in jest.

It is often hard to discern if the President’s bluster is just a bluff or his real intent, damn the consequences. He doesn’t seem to be bluffing or engaging in his brand of transaction diplomacy with Ukraine. Continue reading →

Trump vs Congress Showdown

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON | FEB 3, 2025 (Updated 2/19/25)

“The Founders knew they were creating something different and, hopefully lasting. They were visionary. No constitutional democratic republic has survived as long as ours. Maybe our longevity is to the credit of (John) Adams and other Founders who were smart enough not to create a pure democracy or a monarchy, as some preferred, but a democratic republic with three branches of government, each serving as a check and balance of the other.” — Fixing Congress: Restoring Power to the People, (Chapter 15, Pg 265)

The separation of powers and the checks and balances that make our government functional are part of the genius of our Constitution and a reason for its historic longevity.

President Donald Trump’s early actions tell us he rejects the premise of checks and balances and with an unorthodox view of the separation of powers and believes he can muscle his way past them.

The alarm bells are ringing.

The checks and balances are embedded in Articles I, II, and III of the Constitution, along with separation of powers among the branches of government, each of which is distinct, function separately but answer to each other and hopefully function as one. I will try to connect my dots here with the disclaimer that I’m not an historian, nor a constitutional scholar. What I do know is that Mr. Trump’s autocratic view of the first three Articles has him speeding along an unfamiliar road without political or ideological GPS.

I’ve always found it helpful to take a step back before leaping forward, so back to history. Continue reading →

Introducing A Civic State of Mind

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON | JAN 30, 2025

A new year has dawned and so will a new opportunity to reshape the way we are governed and clean up the way we conduct our politics.

There is hope among many Americans that the new Congress will be better than the one just concluded, which had among the worst records in history.

The reason for the optimism may be grounded in pessimism: How can it get any worse? Public trust in government is in the tank.

The governing crisis we are in is not new, of course. The crisis has been creeping up on us like nasty vines that wind their way around the tree, in this our body politic, grown from roots dating back almost a half century. Continue reading →

Restoring Civic Education, Civic Engagement, and Civil Discourse

“Knowledge about the ideas embodied in the Constitution and the ways in which it shapes our lives is not passed down from generation to generation through the gene pool; it must be learned anew by each generation.”
–The late Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, founder of iCivics

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON | NOV 13, 2024

Emily Brubaker, a middle school student from Alaska, thin framed in her dark suit and wire glasses, strode onto a stage in the nation’s capital. She had to wait for the microphone to be lowered for her to reach. She was there to make her case for legislation mandating insurance coverage for people with a serious medical condition that does harm to both eyes and teeth.

Emily was confident and convincing and, combined with other demonstrated skills, she emerged the victor in the first annual National Civics Bee Championship held in Washington, D.C. and hosted by the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation.

Close behind in second place was Michael O’Mara from Iowa, and in third, Keith Lee representing New Mexico, both 14. They were among the finalists competing for the honor.

While they didn’t get the attention of the elections a week prior, the students were tested in a competition that metaphorically was similarly consequential, not just for the students but for a nation of citizens young and old lacking the civics education needed to fulfill their role as future leaders and responsible citizens. Continue reading →

Random Thoughts

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON | AUG 1, 2024

I find famous quotations therapeutic. Some make you smile. Some become an aha moment. Some make you wish you had said that. A couple of examples with more later.

Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. — James Bovard, Libertarian author, lecturer

If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free! — P. J. O’Rourke, author and political satirist

It’s good to have a little comic relief now and then, particularly now. There’s not much to smile about when it comes to the national debt crisis just around the corner. Continue reading →

Biden Stands Down; Will the Real Donald Trump Please Stand Up?

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON | JULY 22, 2024

President Biden, for the “good of the country and his party” ended his campaign for the Presidency over the weekend and endorsed his Vice President Kamala Harris.

The media have been consumed by the immediacy of this wild and crazy time in America, as you’d expect. But as difficult as it seems there are more long-term issues at stake. More coming.

Popular opinion has it that Harris is the heir apparent and recent events would bear that out. But her nomination is not a done deal. The convention outcome is still subject to the whims of the kingmakers (superdelegates) and influencers, and the unbound convention delegates. More will depend on her polling numbers, which have not been much better than Biden’s, although they should experience a bump up. Continue reading →

The Biden Predicament: Public Peril

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON | JULY 9, 2024

“Good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgment.” — Dr. Kerr L. White, famous physician and author, native of Winnipeg, citizen of the world.

The early years of my life’s journey were replete with questionable—okay, bad—judgment. But along the road, through seven decades, most of my experiences afforded me better judgment.
The most valuable experience has been just growing old; maturing and appreciating that on any given day I am not the person I was the previous day. Change is constant and inevitable. If you are open to it, with it comes enlightenment and ultimately the wisdom and humility to know how much you don’t know.

President Joe Biden, just a few years my senior, seems to be still in denial about aging. His spirit is robust but his mind and body are not. His reasoning is stunted.

I am among those on the aging side of aging who believe the President has not reached a reality: he cannot do justice to the immense job and grave responsibilities he holds, certainly not for another four years. He has lost the battle between wisdom and wishful thinking. You have a choice at our age: you embrace aging gracefully or grudgingly. He seems to be captive of the latter. Continue reading →

The First of July, the Second, the Third, and the Fourth

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON | JULY 4, 2024

This week we celebrate national independence. By “we” I mean both Canadians and Americans. So let’s start at the first of July and trace the unique moments we share on days in July.

Canadians got their crack at tearing off the British yoke on July 1. On that day in 1867, the Constitution Act was adopted by the British parliament essentially creating the Dominion of Canada, still under the authority of the British Crown but essentially free to form its own national parliament and provincial governments. It is marked 157 years later with celebrations replete with picnics, hot dogs, and fireworks.

Oh and a day off. It was twelve years later in 1879 that a federal law was enacted making July 1 a statutory holiday as the anniversary of confederation. It later became “Dominion Day” and still later “Canada Day.”

The celebration moves back across the border the next day, July 2. It was on that day in 1776 that the Continental Congress actually voted to declare our independence from Britain, not July 4th.

Continue reading →

The Real Mike Johnson Did Stand Up

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON | MAY 17, 2024

It has been written and rewritten that six months ago Rep. Mike Johnson was a backbencher, unknown to much of the public outside his home state of Louisiana. So, when he became Speaker of the House, he faced a tough crowd all too anxious to pass judgement on him before there was any judgment to pass.

The media mostly concluded within days that only six years into his congressional career he was still a wet-behind-the-ears apprentice, wore a MAGA hat to bed at night, and was too captive to his religious beliefs to lead a secular Congress.

Even members of his Republican conference told the media, anonymously of course, that he was a “leader in name only,” and was having a “bad, very, very bad awful time leading the House Republican conference,” according to columnist Marc Theissen writing in the Washington Post.
What a difference six months make, eh, as my relatives north of the border would say.

In short order, Speaker Johnson planted his feet on tremoring ground and acted like a Speaker. He rose like the mythical phoenix from the ashes of chaos and total dysfunction in Congress (hyperbole is not for the timid). He prevented a government shutdown, won reauthorization of the Security Surveillance Act, got the appropriations process back on track, and won approval of critical aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. Johnson also reopened the passageway between House Democrats and Republicans so that governing could actually take place. Continue reading →

Campus Protest Comparisons Don’t Compare

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON | MAY 10, 2024

I still remember lying awake in my bed for a long time, no air conditioning, only a slight breeze coming from a small window near the ceiling on a hot August night.

But it wasn’t the heat keeping me awake. It was the pop-pop-pop of gunfire that seemed to be coming from the San Diego Freeway just a mile or so away from where I was living on Evergreen Street in Inglewood, CA.

It was 59 years ago, August of 1965. A section of Los Angeles called Watts was up in smoke.
I’ve forgotten yesterday, but I remember yesteryear.

I was a tall, skinny 18-year-old kid fresh from my first year of college and my second time that far away from the Great Plains of South Dakota. I was working as a sheet metal apprentice on construction jobs around LA that summer with my dad, who I hadn’t seen in more than a decade and didn’t really know. Much to the unspoken dismay of my mother, who had devoted her life to getting my sister, brother, and me reared and educated in his absence, I had gotten on a TWA plane and headed West, so I could get to know my dad and stepmother and the big wide world outside Sioux Falls. Continue reading →

Can Congress Be Fixed?

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON | APR 18, 2024

This first appeared in Katie Couric Media

Congress is broken and needs to be fixed…but there is a path forward.

Do you believe the federal government ought to be active or passive, bigger or smaller, weak or strong, socialist or anarchist, isolationist or internationalist — or somewhere in between?

Don’t dwell on it too long. Your opinion doesn’t matter. You know why?

Because the vast majority of those options can’t be transformed into public policy when government can’t function; and more to the point, if Congress can’t legislate. Which is exactly what’s happening now. Continue reading →

The Putrid Politics of Immigration

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON | JAN 31, 2024

There is no more glaring example of non-functioning government and the suffocating effect of ugly partisan politics than the illegal immigration crisis. It is a national humiliation. Immigration has been a cornerstone of our experiment in individual freedom over two centuries.

“The vast array and diversity of the people our way of life has beckoned here has helped mold the American character. It has also challenged what we stand for, what we strive to be. It is hard to calculate the benefits that flow from the American melting pot. But it is also hard to ignore the intractable problems that have spilled over the edges from unlawful entry. Now it has once again gotten away from us, out of our control.”

Those words are in quotation marks because I wrote them three years ago this April. Matters have only gotten horribly worse since then. The serious solutions proposed over the past two decades, if laid end-to-end would be, well, very long. But the courage to resolve the issues comes up very short. Continue reading →

A Christmas Question for the Ages

BY JAY BRYANT | DEC 24, 2023

“Why does Santa give rich kids more presents than poor kids?” the little girl asked.

From the mouths of babes, her grandfather thought. Of course, she had no idea of the complexity of the question. He knew the answer, and he didn’t want to take too long in telling it to her, for fear she would interpret his silence, though momentary, as confirmation of her worst fears.

That had happened to him before. In the most dramatic case, a businessman had asked a question on the telephone, a question for which the answer was far more complex than the man could have known. The grandfather, not yet a grandfather then, had hesitated, and the man had interjected, “I guess your silence tells me all I need to know.” That was certainly wrong, but it didn’t matter. The man had hung up, and the grandfather knew he had lost a lot of money and a friend in those few seconds of hesitation.

“Because,” he told the little girl, “Santa isn’t dealing in things, really. He’s dealing in happiness.” Continue reading →

Gobble, Gobble, Gobble Translated: End the Political Rage

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON | NOV 20, 2023

(Not to be confused with the Mike Johnson who is now the Speaker of the House, although I do go by Mike Johnson most of the time but use my full name when writing so not to be confused with another Mike Johnson who is a well-known lobbyist in Washington or was at one time. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask. I know how confusing keeping so many Mike Johnsons straight can be.)

And now we return you to: Gobble, Gobble, Gobble.

Thanksgiving is a holiday for family, friends, fellowship, and love, but most of all gratitude. Two years ago, on the eve of Thanksgiving, I wrote about this redeeming holiday just days away. What I wrote then, to my disappointment, is even more apt today.

Thanksgiving is a day—hopefully a season, not just a day—when we reflect on what in our lives is good, and how we got to this place 400 years after the feast that made turkeys fear for their lives thereafter.

Here is an updated version of that column, with a fervent hope that it won’t be relevant two years from now. Continue reading →

The Pillars of Democracy

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON | NOV 6, 2023

The Lincoln Memorial along the shores of the Potomac River was designed by architect Henry Bacon as a likeness to the Parthenon, the ancient Greek temple. The Parthenon had 25 beautiful columns forming its rectangular sides. Some of them are still standing today above Athens as a monument to the enduring legacy of what became the cradle of democracy. The Parthenon was constantly being restored after centuries of storms, wars, and revolutions.

The Lincoln Memorial, a contemporary replica of the Greek temple, has 36 columns, the number of states in the Union Lincoln preserved. They symbolize the pillars of our democratic Republic, the enduring civic and governmental institutions that have girded our system of governance. Those 36 pillars literally hold up the Lincoln Memorial just as those institutions figuratively support our system of governance.

The Lincoln is more than its legacy. The Memorial should be a constant reminder that our democratic Republic has faced serious and corrosive challenges before and the nation has counted on those institutions to preserve the very structure of the Union. Continue reading →

“Not all Republicans are the same.”

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON | OCT 27, 2023

Guess who said it.

You don’t like playing games? Okay. Okay.

If you watch the View, you would know. It was Whoopi Goldberg.

Say what!?

Yup. Whoopi. Ms. Goldberg got groans and guffaws from the audience when she said it, according to an account I read. She should have gotten oohs and ahhs. It was a pretty remarkable observation and brave, given the criticism that “all Republicans” engender, especially after the debacle over the Speakership of Kevin McCarthy and the ensuing mud fight to find a replacement. House Republicans finally settled on Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana (how can you go wrong with a name like that?) as the 56th Speaker of the House of Representatives. Continue reading →

Remodel the Barn, Don’t Destroy It

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON | OCT 16, 2023

These days we are being constantly reminded of legendary former House Speaker Sam Rayburn’s ageless admonition that any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a real good carpenter to build one.

Rayburn’s insight is apropos as the nation’s agenda remains blocked by Republicans fighting among themselves over the election of a new Speaker. The former Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, was deposed on October 3 by a strange-bedfellows cabal of eight Republicans and 210 Democrats. The Republicans then nominated Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana and it just took a day for him to accept his inevitable defeat by the full House.

Days later the next GOP nominee for Speaker, Ohio’s firebrand Jim Jordan discovered after two Floor votes that he, too, didn’t have the votes, short 20 and then 22 votes. The next chapter is being written as this is written. What will happen next will probably not be good. Continue reading →

Saying Goodbye to Friends and Mentors and the Gifts They Gave

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON | FEB 12, 2023

“Congress killed the federal aid to education bill and I don’t blame them. If there’s one thing those fellas have to worry about it’s educated voters.”

Trivia question: Was that quip made by Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Will Rogers, George Carlin or Bob Orben?

Bob who?

Yes, Bob Orben. It was among thousands of funny lines written by Bob, one of the most prolific and sought after comedy writers of a bygone era. Bob died February 2, 2023, at the age of 95. He was a friend, colleague, and mentor during a surreal time in my life. He always had good advice: “Old people shouldn’t eat health food,” he quipped, “they need all the preservatives they can get.” A good friend of his was quoted in a newspaper obituary that “it probably wasn’t lost on him that he died on Groundhog Day.” Continue reading →

‘Cannot See the Forest For the Trees’

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON | JAN 12, 2023

‘Cannot See the Forest for the Trees’ is an old English idiom that the dictionary says dates back to the 16th Century. It describes a situation in which the bigger picture is overlooked because of a focus on detail.

It came to mind during the 4-day super-charged opening of the 118th Congress that ultimately resulted in the election of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker.

Twenty House Republicans turned the usually ritualistic formality into high drama. There was a dichotomy of motivations as Karl Rove pointed out in the Wall Street Journal today. Some of those members had a sincere if not passionate interest in rules changes that would open up the legislative process so that rank-and-file members had more influence over the flow of bills, resolutions, and amendments. There was merit in some of those changes, but not all. Karen Tumulty explored those worthwhile procedures in the Washington Post.

Others were making a power grab or just sticking it to Kevin McCarthy, who they consider a poor legislator and lacking in ideology or allegiance to their right-wing orthodoxy—distinguishable from conservative orthodoxy.

But the combatants really overlooked the forest for the trees. Continue reading →