LATIMES.COM/OPINION S THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 2020A
OP-ED
The problem withRudy
Giuliani isn’t that his
mascara runs or that he
held a postelection event
next to an adult book
shop. Nor is it his behav-
ior toward the young
woman in the Borat mov-
ie or his pinkie ring or the
fact that he told his second wife he was
divorcing her by announcing it at a news
conference.
The problem with the former New
York City mayor is that he doesn’t respect
elections.
Not only has Giuliani been President
Trump’s chief accomplice in his outra-
geous and deceptive efforts to subvert the
will of the American people, a role he is
continuing to play even as the transition
gets underway, but he also fought hard in
the aftermath of 9/11 to keep himself in
office after his term as mayor ran out.
Let me remind you what happened
then.
Sept. 11, 2001, in New York City was a
crisp, shockingly clear fall day. When the
two World Trade Center towers were
attacked, and then collapsed in a cloud of
dust, steel and concrete, then-Mayor
Giuliani rose to the occasion, emerging
from an office two blocks away covered in
ash but ready to defend the city. He was
calm and commanding in the days that
followed, supporting first responders and
comforting survivors and speaking effec-
tively for an anxious city. He revived his
battered political image, reinventing
himself as “America’s mayor.”
Sept. 11 was also primary day in New
York City. A mayoral election was under-
way. Giuliani was termed out — it was the
end of his second term and his time in
City Hall was up at the end of the year.
More than half a dozen candidates —
including Mark Green and Michael
Bloomberg, who eventually became the
nominees in the general election — were
fighting for their parties’ support. Be-
cause of the World Trade Center attacks,
that day’s primary was put off for two
weeks.
Delaying the primary was entirely
reasonable. People weren’t going to turn
out to vote on a day when the city had
been violently terrorized.
But Giuliani saw an opportunity for
something else. In the days that followed
— as he watched his poll numbers rise —
Giuliani and his aides and supporters
began hinting that the mayor shouldn’t
be required to leave office when his term
was up. What the city really needed was
an extraordinary three-month extension
of his term to help deal with the fallout of
the attack and ease the transition for the
next mayor. This was a catastrophe after
all. Steady leadership was needed. The
November election should be canceled.
Or maybe that wasn’t enough. In fact,
according to Giuliani and his aides, the
1993 law barring him from serving a third
consecutive term should be overturned
entirely if his bid for an extension was
rejected and he should be allowed to run
again. Giuliani even considered trying to
get himself on the ballot despitethe term
limits law. He lobbied the governor and
the Legislature to keep him in office.
Trump-like, Giuliani insisted that
supporters were “begging me to stay in
the run for another term.”
He got some support in the heat of the
crisis, but a lot of pushback too. The New
York Civil Rights Coalition accused Giu-
liani of bullying the mayoral candidates
and being “disruptive to electoral democ-
racy.” The Democrats in the state Assem-
bly (whose support was necessary for any
extension) refused to back his proposal.
Frederick A.O. Schwarz, who had served
as the city’s top lawyer, said Giuliani had
“created the very dangerous idea that we
couldn’t survive without him.”
Republican Gov. George Pataki wrote
later that Giuliani’s team “pushed the
issue” with the governor’s staff for weeks.
Pataki finally told Giuliani he would
neither support an extension nor cancel
the upcoming election.
“Regardless of Rudy’s motivation,
regardless of his raw emotions in the
situation, he abandoned some of the
most basic conservative principles — to
follow the law and relinquish power when
your term is over, even in times of crisis,”
Pataki wrote later.
Sound familiar?
Another opponent of Giuliani’s at-
tempted power grab was his friend Arizo-
na Republican Sen. John McCain, who
advised the mayor to back down. Accord-
ing to ABC News at the time, McCain
cautioned Giuliani to “listen to people
you trust, not people who have a stake in
your decision.”
When it became clear that state lead-
ers would not authorize his continuing on
as an unelected mayor, Giuliani gave in.
But he appears to have learned nothing
from the experience.
Even as he approved starting the
transition, Trump refused to concede
and may well never do so. His tactics —
and Giuliani’s — have undermined the
integrity of a legitimate election in the
eyes of Americans and deepened the
fissures in an already deeply divided
country.
It is precisely in times of crisis —
whether a terrorist attack or a pandemic
— that democracy must show its resil-
ience. Rules, laws and norms, including
elections, obviously shouldn’t be tossed
aside at the first signs of strain.
That’s a lesson Giuliani should have
learned two decades ago when the towers
came down.
@Nick_Goldberg
Giuliani’s
previous
failed stand
NICHOLAS GOLDBERG
A
s I was making my weekly
grocery deliveries to my
mother and my in-laws in El
Monte last week, I spotted a
line of more than 25 cars stop-
ping traffic at Santa Anita Avenue. They
were waiting to enter the parking lot of the
food pantry there. The patiently inching
cars, wrapped around the block, were
another reminder that this Thanksgiving
is unlike anything any of us has ever seen.
As in so many other places, the mood
around town seems subdued by pandemic
stresses. The only remotely festive street
decorations are the banners from the
spring that celebrate 2020’s college gradu-
ates. Some of the city’s recent online posts
seem falsely cheery — announcements for
the Turkey Trot Marathon and a Thanks-
giving Tablescaping Challenge that I can’t
imagine anyone around here doing.
Gratitude is difficult to muster this
year, when El Monte stands among the
cities in Los Angeles County with the
highest COVID-19 rates. El Monte now has
a case rate of more than 570 per 100,
residents. In this way, our city resembles
Pomona and La Puente and Downey and
Maywood and numerous others. Naming
these places feels like naming family, be-
cause their Latinx communities make up
so much of the county’s front-line and
essential workers. This vulnerable popula-
tion accounts for 40% of reported co-
ronavirus infections and 51% of COVID-
deaths in the county.
At the start of the pandemic, I entered
the jobs of everyone in our family on aCOVID-19 exposure-risk chart and found
that my wife, a social worker in a county
hospital, had the highest position on the
grid, her red dot alongside the one for
paramedics. We paused our 4-year-old
son’s daily child-care routine with his
abuelitosboth to lessen their risk and to
reduce ours, since my wife’s mother works
as a picker in a warehouse where the virus
claimed a temporary worker in Building E,
a death that has remained a shadowy
catalyst in our worries.
That anxiety has been a constant since
the spring. One April night, our bathroom
reeked so intensely of rubbing alcohol that
I thought our bottle had spilled under the
sink. I soon realized the odor was coming
from next door. Our neighbor was wiping
down every interior surface in his family’s
cars because his wife had tested positive
for the coronavirus. For her, that was the
beginning of an 81-day ordeal that would
span three hospitals, three weeks in the
ICU, two weeks of residential physical
therapy and countless Zoom rosary ses-
sions. When she finally came home in July,
everyone felt it was a genuine miracle.
This year was supposed to be the year
my son finally got to play T-ball (“Go T-
Ball Dodgers!”), the year we took him to
Legoland, the year that he and a 4-year-old
neighbor would become good friends.
Instead, the boys continue saying hello by
peeking over the wall that separates them.
My son’s 2020 has been full of disappoint-
ments.
It has also been the year that my wife
and I became drive-by party experts. The
year that she developed admirable sign-
lettering skills and I figured out that thebest way to attach Happy 75th Birthday!!!/
Happy Graduation!!!/Happy 70th Birth-
day!!!/Happy Beyoncé Birthday!!!/Happy
Lisa Simpson Birthday!!! signs to our car
is to use magnets, not packing tape. At
each celebration, my relatives and I do a
chócalawith our elbows and say that we
intend to stay alive so we can party for real
when this is all over. But 2020 has also been
the year when my wife and I confront the
fact that staying alive may not be up to us.
And so we have chosen to find delight in
the daily moments with our son. Delight at
his index finger tapping on my arm as he
sits beside me and stares at math home-
work on his computer screen, delight when
he lines his stuffed animals across our
couch so they can watch his cumbiatón
dance moves. Delight as I spin him around
in my arms the way my father once did
with me, delight even when consoling him
as he cries at crucial Dodger victories
because the neighborhood’s celebratory
fireworks still scare him.
If this year has any silver lining, it has
been getting to be so present for the incre-
mental developments in our child’s life.
For months now, at dinner each night, we
have toasted being together, the three of
us, the clinking of our glasses a true act of
thanksgiving, a conscious appreciation
that we have gotten another day. Because
he’s only 4, I don’t know what our son will
remember of this time. I hope to recall as
much of it as I can.Michael Jaime-Becerrais an associate
professor of creative writing at UC
Riverside and author of “Every Night Is
Ladies’ Night.”Mustering up gratitude in 2020
The mood in town is full of worry. Inside my house, we wait for better days.
Nicole VasLos Angeles TimesBy Michael Jaime-BecerraT
his year I’mgiving thanks for
the independent judiciary.
In the last four years, we have
witnessed an unprecedented
assault on the institutions of
government and civil society and many of
these attacks have been alarmingly success-
ful. By and large, however, the courts have
held. President Trump has not been able to
co-opt them or bend them to his bidding.
Not that he hasn’t tried. It started before
the 2016 election, when candidate Trump
alleged that a judge who was to preside over
a pair of fraud cases involving Trump Uni-
versity had an “absolute conflict” because
he was Mexican. In fact, the judge was born
in Indiana; his parents had emigrated from
Mexico.
According to Trump, the judge’s national
heritage would bias him because of the
campaign’s anti-Latino rhetoric and the
promise to build a border wall between
Mexico and the United States. (That the
wall is still mostly a pipe dream is another
reason to give thanks.)
Trump’s jaundiced view that judges
serve their friends and patrons, not the law,
has remained to the last. He has been open
in his expectation that the three justices he
appointed to the Supreme Court would rule
for him if presented with an election-decid-
ing case. On Saturday, when U.S. District
Judge Matthew Brann, of Pennsylvania,
issued a blistering opinion against the presi-
dent’s attempt to throw out that state’s
votes, he tweeted that Brann was “a product
of Senator Pat ‘No Tariffs’ Toomey of Penn-
sylvania, no friend of mine.”
From the outset of Trump’s adminis-
tration — in a series of decisions blocking
the president’s initial Muslim ban in Janu-
ary 2017 — federal judges have not shied
away from scrutinizing the administration’s
hyper-aggressive executive orders andslapdash administrative work. All in all, the
president and his lawyers have posted a
dismal record of 28-131 in legal challenges to
the use of government agencies to deregu-
late or otherwise implement policy.
And when it comes to criminal prosecu-
tions, the federal courts have also had little
problem defying the president. U.S. District
Judges Amy Berman Jackson and Emmet
G. Sullivan, in particular, have given no
quarter to Trump cronies Michael Flynn,
Paul Manafort and Roger Stone when over-
seeing their prosecutions in Washington.
(Trump, however, pardoned Flynn on
Wednesday, as he had Stone previously.)
Even at the ever-more-conservative
Supreme Court, the administration has lost
more than half of its cases, the worst bottom
line of any president since Franklin D.
Roosevelt. Trump’s failures in the high
court included an attempt to add a citi-
zenship question to the census and to undo
crucial portions of the Deferred Action for
Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program. (It
is worth noting, though, that every adminis-
tration since FDR’s has done slightly worse
than its predecessor at the high court.)
The judiciary’s independence has been
on particular display in the last three weeks.
Again and again, judges at the state and
federal level have eviscerated the Trump
campaign’s effort to steal the 2020 election.
They have forced the president’s lawyers to
abandon allegations of fraud, conceding
that the attorneys could produce no sup-
porting evidence.
Compare the administration’s record in
the courts with the state of play in the rest of
government. Sifting through the rubble at
the end of Trump’s presidency, we find a
broken Senate and a dysfunctional legisla-
ture, a presidency corrupted by lies and
apparent self-dealing, and compromised
agencies as important as the CDC and the
Postal Service. Core Washington institu-
tions are in the grip of leaders scared of thepresident and in thrall to his caprices.
However, even an independent judiciary
couldn’t foil all of Trump’s egregious consti-
tutional mischief. Between delaying tactics,
issues of standing, and the Justice Depart-
ment rule that sitting presidents can’t be
indicted, the president has managed to
avoid judicial reckoning for a lot of bad
conduct — ignoring subpoenas, flouting the
emoluments clause, and as the Mueller
report documented, engaging in apparent
obstruction of justice.
It’s also true that over the last few years a
handful of judges, perhaps hoping for a
Supreme Court appointment, have issued
unconvincing opinions in his favor. U.S.
District Judge Neomi Rao is one example;
among other outlier decisions, she sided
with dropping the case against Flynn, de-
spite the fact he twice pleaded guilty to lying
to the FBI.
Such toadying to the president isn’t good,
but it’s not unique to this administration.
Worse, and altogether Trump’s doing, we
must brace for a flood of society-altering
far-right opinions from the Supreme Court’s
new majority and from roughly 200 Trump-
appointed lower court judges.
Nonetheless, the courts as an institution
never went in the tank for Trump, nor
seemed at real risk of doing so. Federal
judges aren’t morally superior to other
public servants, but because they have life
tenure, they are insulated from Trump’s
favored disciplinary tool: termination by
Twitter.
President Trump was able to bulldoze
through too many checks and balances, but
with the judiciary, the framers’ design
proved up to the task. The court’s track
record isn’t quite a turkey dinner with all the
trimmings, but it can provide us with suste-
nance as we enter an otherwise precarious
holiday season.@HarryLitmanBe thankful for the independent judiciary