Gary McGath

About Gary McGath

I am a freelance technical writer in Plaistow, NH.

25th Amendment 101

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged Congress Constitution law on by

A lot of people on the left are engaging in magical thinking. They claim that the 25th Amendment of the US Constitution can somehow be used to remove Trump from power. It can’t. It shouldn’t be hard to understand. The relevant text is Section 4 of the amendment:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

 
Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

Action under this provision requires action by the vice president. By James David Vance. By Trump’s puppet. He isn’t going to do it. Perhaps he’d like to stage a coup, but Trump’s base would turn furiously against him if he tried. Besides, the other requirements would keep him from making it stick.

In addition to the VP, the provision requires the action of a majority of the Cabinet or of “such other body as Congress may by law provide.” Some people in Congress are trying to create such a body, but Trump would veto the bill. They’d need 2/3 of both houses to make it a law. Not going to happen. Nor is the Cabinet, which consists of Trump loyalists, going to turn against him.

But suppose alien mind control beams make Vance and the Cabinet agree to declare Trump unable to discharge his powers and duties. All Trump has to do is say, “I am able,” and he’s back in power until Congress resolves the issue. To make the removal of his powers stick, a 2/3 vote of both houses is necessary. Not going to happen.

I’m excluding hypothetical cases where Trump goes into a coma and can’t do anything. That’s what the 25th Amendment was designed for.

Impeachment is a lower bar. It requires a majority of the House and 2/3 of the Senate. That’s still extremely unlikely, but it’s not as improbable as the 25th Amendment path.

If facts matter anymore, the case for impeachment is stronger than the case for declaring him incapable of doing the job. Has Trump committed “high crimes and misdemeanors”? Tons of them. Is he incapable of carrying out his duties? That rests on a claim that he’s clinically insane, which is more open to dispute.

The Democrats in Congress can read the Constitution, or at least they have staff members to explain it to them. They know all this. So why are they pursuing an impossible path? I think it’s to divert attention from Congress’s failure to impeach Trump. They can pretend they’re doing something, knowing that Vance will protect them against any action actually happening. They can say, “Hey, we tried,” knowing full well they didn’t.

What about all the people on Bluesky who don’t have public images to manipulate? That’s easy, too. They’re stupid. In the Bonhoeffer sense, that is.

Book discussion: How Jesus Became God

This entry was posted in Book discussion and tagged books history religion on by

Christianity is a big part of our culture, and even non-Christians have to make some sense of it. I like Bart Ehrman’s treatments of Biblical research. He’s skeptical but not belligerent. I’ve previously read his Misquoting Jesus and enjoyed it. How Jesus Became God addresses questions I’ve been curious about: Why do Christians think he was God incarnate? What exactly do they mean by it? The average Christian isn’t sure, and the more you dig into the questions, the weirder it gets.

Ehrman accepts the existence of the historical Jesus but says he never claimed to be divine. His status gradually grew after his death. Jesus’s followers believed he had risen from the dead, so he was the “Son of God” in some sense, at least after his resurrection. By steps which Ehrman traces, the idea expanded. First he gained special status after the resurrection; then he was anointed of God through his ministry, then from his birth, and at last from the beginning of time. Many variations of these views existed side by side, with their advocates calling each other heretics. The Nicean Council tried to standardize the belief, but it wasn’t till years later that Christianity mostly settled down to the currently standard view.

Cover of How Jesus Became GodThis view is that Jesus is God but isn’t God the Father; that God is one but also three; that the Son was begotten of the Father but always existed from the beginning of time. Make sense of that if you can. For most Christians, these details don’t matter, but early Christians thought that if they didn’t get Jesus’s nature exactly right, they might go to Hell for blasphemy. Apparently God is full of mercy but will torture believers forever if they don’t pass a theology quiz.

Ehrman notes that the only Gospel in which Jesus claims to be a divine being is John, which scholars think was written later than the others. If he really made such claims, he notes, it’s strange that Matthew, Mark, and Luke don’t mention them.

In Ehrman’s view, Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher, expecting the world to end soon and be replaced by the Kingdom of God under his leadership. He thought he was a Messiah but not a divine being. There were many others like him. Ehrman thinks the reason Christianity was so successful was that Jesus’s followers had “visions” of him as a resurrected person. He uses the term as a neutral one, not taking a position on whether they were real or not. There comes one of the problems with the book: it promotes a compartmentalized way of thinking. Ehrman refuses to take a stand as a historian on whether the resurrection happened or not.

He writes: “Religious faith and historical knowledge are two different ways of ‘knowing.’ This effectively grants equal validity to both. Elsewhere he claims, “University intellectuals almost never speak of ‘objectivity’ any more, unless they happen to live on the margins of intellectual life.” If objectivity is impossible, if research and bald assertion have equal epistemological status, then anything goes.

Ehrman’s description of the official Christian (or at least Catholic) position on Jesus’s nature makes it sound even crazier than I had thought. He argues convincingly that Jesus probably didn’t have a proper burial but was just thrown on a pile of bodies; that was what the Romans did with crucified people. But if Jesus wasn’t buried in a tomb, there couldn’t have been an empty tomb to find. The whole account unravels, yet Ehrman won’t say that the claims of Jesus’s recognition are groundless fantasy.

These notions aren’t harmless stories. As Ehrman notes, Christian authorities have had many people tortured and executed for heresy. The Jewish people were persecuted for centuries for killing the immortal God. Nonsense should be called out as nonsense when it affects people’s lives.

Even so, How Jesus Became God is very readable, and Ehrman’s explanation of the development of Christian beliefs is fascinating. If that’s a subject that interests you, I think you’ll like the book.

Don’t inoculate people against reason

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged psychology SanityProject on by

I’ve been reading about a psychological notion called “inoculation theory.” The idea is that just as people can gain immunity to a disease by being exposed to a weakened pathogen, they may develop resistance to a point of view as a result of hearing weak arguments for it. Most discussions of the idea that I’ve seen focus on doing this intentionally, but it also works when people hear bad attempts to convince them.

Suppose there’s some position for which you’ve heard only ridiculous arguments. After a while, you’ll stop paying attention to any arguments for it, even if one of them actually presents a good case. If someone claims to have solid evidence that 9/11 was an inside job, Trump won the 2020 election, or the Moon landings were faked, are you going to spend much time listening? Probably not. Usually that’s a rational response; if there were good arguments for these claims, you’d have heard them before. But if you get all your information from your social media bubble, genuinely good arguments can be drowned out by the ridiculous ones. People love to repost bad arguments to expose them to ridicule. Others repost whatever favors their cause without verifying it, and readers stop paying attention.

A bad argument can be worse than silence. In a well-known story, the townspeople are “inoculated” against the boy’s cries of “Wolf!” When you offer weak or invalid claims to a skeptical audience, they’ll assume you have nothing better to offer.

Returning, inevitably, to Donald Trump, I’d like to give two examples I’ve often seen. One is the claim that he’s a “pedophile.” While there have been accusations, he hasn’t been charged with a crime, and I haven’t seen strong supporting evidence. If that’s the worst you can say about him, you’ll only convince his supporters that you don’t have a good case against him.

A second example is the statement that’s he’s a “felon.” He has been convicted of a felony, but it’s not one that gets most people excited. He didn’t report hush money as a campaign expense. It isn’t obvious to non-lawyers and non-accountants that he was required to, and some lawyers without an axe to grind have called the case dubious. These two claims are far weaker than the undisputed facts that he ordered civilian boats sunk without a legal process, started a war, pardoned everyone who broke into the Capitol to support his election claim, and threatened to destroy a civilization.

It’s also possible to inoculate people against words and concepts. Some people toss “Communist!” around as an all-purpose comeback; others use “Racist!” After a while, listeners treat the words as noise, whether they apply or not.

Some people say that more arguments are always better. They aren’t, if the arguments are weak. People have limits on their attention span and patience. If you strain both, you lose your audience, and you’ll have a hard time getting it back.

Update: I just found another good article on this issue: “The paradox of argument strength” in Nature.

Credit the songwriter!

This entry was posted in Music Writing and tagged music writing on by

The idea for this post started when I tried to find out if the resemblance of the 1979 song “Gloria” to the “Gloria” of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis was intentional. (It was.) While doing the usual Internet searches, I found it repeatedly referred to as Laura Branigan’s song, even on lyrics sites, although she didn’t write it. Not to take away from her excellent performance, but she wrote neither the music, the original lyrics, nor the English-language version. Wikipedia credits Giancarlo Bigazzi and Umberto Tozzi as the creators of the original song and Jonathan King as the author of the English-language lyrics. Tozzi performed the Italian song before Branigan. Yet somehow Branigan gets all the credit.

(I’m not counting Beethoven as a creator. The song uses only nine notes of his. They give the song its backbone but not its content.)

I cited another example of failure to credit the song writer in a book discussion a couple of months ago.

It’s routine to give performers the credit for songs they didn’t write. The reason is laziness. People hear someone perform a song and assume that person must have written it. If you believe the lyrics sites, Frank Sinatra wrote over a hundred songs, but Wikipedia lists him as the creator or co-creator of only a handful. An exceptional performance makes the difference between a hit and a flop, but the performance wouldn’t exist if no one had written the song. Before recordings became the most common way to hear music, writers got more attention. William Billings, Stephen Foster, George Root, and Irving Berlin were famous names in their time. Today, it’s rare for songwriters to be well known unless they write musicals or perform their own songs.

When you’re writing about a song, especially if the lyrics or the musical content is important, please mention the writer’s or writers’ names.

This post was partially inspired by Debbie Ridpath Ohi’s campaign to get acknowledgement for the illustrators of children’s books. That’s important, too.

The apocalyptic mindset 3

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged liberty psychology religion on by

It’s hard for me to understand the popularity of authoritarian movements. Why would people willingly cede power to someone whose overriding goal is power? Yet it’s happened over and over. Lately I’ve been looking at comments on the Internet and seeing a strong pattern. They see the world as facing an apocalyptic battle between two utterly opposed forces. Their side is good, and anyone who opposes it must be evil. Not only that, their opponents are all on the same side. It’s hard to think of immigrants, Constitutional lawyers, liberals (in all the senses of the word), Muslims, socialists, and the Pope all as a unified front, but to orthodox MAGAs they are.

Evangelical Christianity, which is the heart of Trump’s support, loves the idea that history is a struggle between Satanic and divine forces, and they expect it to culminate in a world war which God, of course, will win. It colors people’s worldview even when they aren’t thinking of supernatural forces. It’s their habit to think of political conflicts as fights between two fully consistent and completely opposed forces. It’s a view that doesn’t leave much room for good people who disagree, honestly mistaken ideas, and people who aren’t wholly on one side or the other.

When you accept this view, it’s reasonable to think anyone on your side is completely trustworthy, anyone opposed is a thorough liar, and anything which supports your side must be right. Anything your side does is good, including threatening to destroy a civilization. It helps if the civilization to be destroyed is aligned with a non-Christian religion.

In praying to God from the Pentagon, “Secretary of War” Hegseth raged: “Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation. Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

Jackson Lahmeyer, a Trump-aligned candidate from Oklahoma who is also an Evangelical pastor, proclaimed, “Good and evil, that’s the story of the Bible. The good news is that at the end good always wins.” Look at chapter 16 of Revelation, if you have the stomach for it. Angels spread skin disease, pollute the seas and fresh water, cause deadly heat waves, and dry up a major river. They’re allegedly working for God, so this makes them “good.”

The Crusades were run on the same mindset. Armies set out to take Jerusalem and the surrounding area because “God wills it!” When the Crusaders took the city in 1099, they massacred thousands of people, mostly Muslims and Jews. They considered their own side “good” not because of their character or deeds, but because they claimed to be on God’s side. They could cite Biblical precedents, such as the genocide of the Canaanites.

Communicating with people who look at the world that way is hard. By the very fact of disagreeing with them, you’re on the side of “evil.” The important thing is to reject their worldview vocally and persistently.