On the morning of September 19, 2019, history will note, President Donald J. Trump officially declared himself to be this country’s first authoritarian dictator. On that day he announced to the world, in a court filing, that he was assuming unlimited criminal immunity to act within or outside the law. He also declared that anyone who works for him on his behalf is also above the law and cannot be investigated, charged or convicted of any crimes as long as he is in office. By logical extension, if no violation of the law can apply to him while in office, then no election can remove him from office and no Congress can remove him by impeachment or check his powers in any way.

This isn’t how the first draft of history read that day. Trump’s dramatic claims received relatively little notice. They came in a court filing and were so outrageous and incredible that no one took it seriously. The headlines on that Thursday read like some variation of this one from the New York Law Journal:

“Trump Sues Manhattan DA Vance in Federal Court in Wake of Tax Subpoenas”

In the wake of the Mueller investigation, with its assortment of indictments, trials, and convictions of Trump associates, there were over a dozen less noticed criminal investigations spun off to be conducted in other states by other prosecutors. It was a court filing in one of these lesser-known investigations that the President announced his sweeping declarations.

On October 7, 2019, District Judge Victor Marrero, of the Southern District of New York, summed up the President’s claim in an introduction to his ruling rejecting Trump’s claim. Judge Marrero’s ruling reads in part:

“The President asserts an extraordinary claim in the dispute now before this Court. He contends that… under the United States Constitution, the person who serves as President, while in office, enjoys absolute immunity from criminal process of any kind. Consider the reach of the President’s argument. [As] the Court reads it, presidential immunity would stretch to cover every phase of criminal proceedings, including investigations, grand jury proceedings and subpoenas, indictment, prosecution, arrest, trial conviction, and incarceration. That constitutional protection presumably would encompass any conduct, at any time, in any forum whether federal or state, and whether the President acted alone or in concert with other individuals. Hence, according to this categorical doctrine as presented in this proceeding, the constitutional dimensions of the presidential shield from judicial process are virtually limitless: Until the President leaves office… [this includes crimes committed in*] his official capacity, but also to ones arising from his private affairs, financial transactions, and all other conduct undertaken by him as an ordinary citizen both during and before his tenure in office.”
“Moreover, on this theory the President’s special dispensation from the criminal law’s purview and judicial inquiry would embrace not only the behavior and activities of the President himself, but also extend derivatively so as to potentially immunize the misconduct of any other person, business affiliate associate, or relative who may have collaborated with the President in committing purportedly unlawful acts, and whose offenses ordinarily would warrant criminal investigation and prosecution of all involved.”

The judge concluded his introduction with these words:

“Because this finds aspects of such a [Presidential] doctrine repugnant to the nation’ s governmental structure and constitutional values, and for the reasons further stated below it ABSTAINS from adjudicating this dispute and DISMISSES the President’ s suit.”

The Trump Administration immediately appealed.

President Trump’s immunity doctrine stemmed from a criminal investigation to see if Trump’s non-profit organization falsified business records.

In summary, Cyrus R. Vance, Jr. is a District Attorney in New York. He empaneled a grand jury to probe whether the Trump Organization falsified business records related to money paid to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal prior to the 2016 Presidential Election to keep them quiet about his sexual relationships with them. These were payoffs funneled through Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. Some of these payments were by checks made out to Cohen from the Trump Organization, a non-profit entity registered in New York. These payments were categorized as legal fees on the books of this non-profit.

Paying to keep damaging information from the public during an election is a violation of campaign finance laws. Using money donated to a non-profit organization for personal use is also a violation of the law, as is falsifying business records to cover up such misdeeds.

The grand jury investigating the business records of the Trump Organization requires documents, tax records and the cooperation of Mazars USA, the accounting firm hired by the Organization. Trump sent a letter to Mazars USA and forbade the company from releasing his tax records. The jury subpoenaed the company to release the last eight years of Donald Trump’s tax returns. That’s when Trump made his move on unlimited Executive power.

How this constitutional crisis resolves is critical to our republic. By elevating William Barr to Attorney General, Trump, and the Republicans have removed any chance that the Barr-lead Justice Department will ever challenge any illegality committed by the President or his administration. By ramming through two ultra-partisan Supreme Court Justices, and by seating so many highly partisan judges to the federal bench, Trump and the Republicans are betting that all legal challenges to both Congressional oversights, or judicial challenges to Trump’s limitless criminal immunity doctrine, will ultimately fail. The complicity of Congressional Republicans in installing this all-powerful authoritarian government should now be obvious. Articles of impeachment should still be aggressively pursued, but it is no longer a given that an impeachment conviction in the Senate would remove Trump from office. Under his unlimited criminal immunity doctrine, it isn’t even certain that he will honor Presidential election results, or even allow future elections.

Here is where I believe we stand. If the courts don’t uphold the rule of law, all hope for the republic is lost. If the courts do uphold the rule of law after House impeachment and Senate conviction, then it will be up to some combination of the President’s willing capitulation, law enforcement, the U.S. military or massive national citizen protests to assure that Donald Trump leaves office. If the Senate won’t convict Trump of impeachable offenses, it is up to the voters to set the stage for the same options mentioned above. If Donald Trump is reelected, however, it will probably be too late to save our Republic from dictatorial rule.

The New York Times recently asked each of the Democratic primary candidates for President a series of identical questions. The last question on their list was, “Does anyone deserve to have a billion dollars?”

The trivial framing of that question bypassed the grave urgency for asking it in the first place. In a variant form of the question, the Times was essentially asking, “Isn’t it OK to be a billionaire if you played by the rules and worked hard to earn it?”

The wording of the question pre-supposes that the laws and social rules in place, by which a person may accumulate a billion-dollars, are fair and open to anyone. It ignores whether inherited wealth is also deserved.  Most importantly, it treats wealth as if it is only a money count and not a measure of privilege and social power. By doing so, the question as it was posed ignored the essential problem that extreme private wealth is toxic to human society regardless of a person’s character or how they obtained it.

A more salient question would have been, “How many more billionaires can this human society sustain before it collapses?

In the 50,000-year history of human civilization, the concepts of private ownership and private wealth are recent developments. The full ramifications of these constructs on our social cohesion and collective welfare are still being revealed. The written history of civilizations offers no comfort. There are no examples of a happy, stable society where extremes of wealth inequality existed. The lessons of history seem to be that a suitable balance of power is required to sustain a healthy and stable society. Human populations simply cannot tolerate distributions of wealth/power that either force unnatural equality or permit unlimited extremes of private wealth.

There is no question that we crossed the Rubicon into a world where extreme wealth inequality is corrupting world governments and destroying the balance of nature. The questions we should be asking candidates for President and all our elected officials are, “What are your plans to rebalance the distribution of wealth and social power in America?”   And then the follow-up question, “What are you going to do to stabilize and rebalance the Earth’s damaged ecology?”

A State Senator in New Jersey fears a $1 raise for the working poor in this state will be too much of a hardship for businesses if the economy slows down a little.

by Brian T. Lynch, MSW

by Brian T. Lynch, MSW

The Party of Lincoln is gone. Forever gone. All that remains of it are a nostalgic band of loyal followers around the country who can’t see, or accept that it’s gone.

Systematically over time, and with stealth, the Republican Party officeholders have been replaced by politicians who are hostile to a pluralistic, democratic Republic in which they must share power with others who don’t look, think, or worship like them. The goal of these democracy-thieves is to take down our Republic and replace it with a Neo-Republican authoritarian state. We have seen how this works in states today that already have all Republican control. An authoritarian, single-party federal government is the only way they can impose the “superior” will on the majority of Americans. Their long-range plans for the takeover of our Republic can be seen most clearly in the broad outlines of their attacks on the government.

When these Neo-Republicans recently controlled the Congress and the Democrats controlled the Executive Branch, they grossly abused their Congressional oversite authority to disrupt the regular order of government. They blocked or attempted to block all legislative initiatives, even ones they had proposed themselves. They blocked all judicial nominations, especially, and most dramatically, to the Supreme Court. In the state governments controlled by them, they suppressed the vote and drew up unconstitutional Congressional districts to hold on to power. They passed unconstitutional anti-abortion laws. In Washington, they shut down the federal the government on several occasions to alienate the affection of the people towards our Republic. They harassed the popularly elected President, Barak Obama, with endless investigations and obstreperous oversite. We thought this was because Obama self-identified as an African-American. This was partly true, but it was only just the surface of what they were really up to, as it turns out.

After the Executive Branch flipped to Trump, with an assist from Russia, the Neo-Republicans ended all over-site while President Donald Trump took a wrecking ball to our Republic and democratic institutions we so admired. He began installing himself as the first Supreme Executive while breaking every norm of the high Office he holds.

Now with Democrats in control of the House of Representatives, regular oversite is being restored. But Donald Trump, backed up by Congressional Neo-Republicans, is resisting any oversite activity whatsoever. He is challenging the House’s authority to hold him accountable in any way. When you step back to look at the big picture it becomes clear that we are experiencing a slow-motion coup d’état.

by Brian T. Lynch, MSW

This is a story of two Irish immigrants who came to America during a different era. Thomas Lynch was from Clonmore, County Meath, and Ellen (Nellie) McGeever was from Doocastle, County Mayo.

Around 1914, during the heart of the Progressive Era, America was rife with turmoil, social activism and political reform from which would soon emerge America’s middle class. Yet even then the embers of the Gilded Age glowed brightly in areas where families of enormous wealth played out their lives of regal excess. During the Gilded Age, the wealthy elite built impressive country estates at which they entertained the rich, famous, and powerful figures of the day.

The Florham Estate in Madison, New Jersey, was one such home.  Built between 1892 and 1899 by Hamilton Twombly and his wife, Florence Vanderbilt, the Florham mansion was the 8th largest home in America. Today the estate is a beautiful college campus, but around 1914 the Florham Mansion was still a mecca of high society.

By contrast, Ireland around 1914 was a fairly dismal place, especially in the countryside where prospects for a better life were nil and subsistence living was the norm. Ireland was still under British rule and the “Irish Question” hung in the air. That question was about how to transform these brutally subjugated people into a semi-autonomous country after nearly 800 years of British rule. Many of the Irish youth couldn’t wait for the answer. They hitched their fate to the “American Dream” and boarded ships to the United States. My future grandparents were among those young dreamers. Nellie McGeever from Doocastle in County Mayo on the west of Ireland, and Thomas Lynch from Clonmore in County Meath in the east set sail for America not knowing each other and not knowing what to expect when they got here.

It wasn’t until my second semester at Fairleigh Dickenson University in 1972 that my father casually mentioned how ironic it was for me to be walking the same grounds where my grandparent met. He told me my grandmother was a cook and my grandfather a chauffeur for the Twombly’s. My aunts later confirmed this as true. I have pieced together a bit more history since, but never felt a real sense of that family history until my sister and I went to see the mansion this January.

My grandfather, Thomas Lynch, was born in 1891, one of thirteen children of Peter Lynch (b.1846) and Catherine Cusick (b.1862). His passage to America was preceded by several of his older brothers who rented a house at 4 Albert Avenue in Morris Township. Ironically, many years later my father would use his GI bill from WW II so his parents could buy that home where they lived the rest of their lives. It was the home my family visited often when I was a boy.

Ellen (Nellie) McGeever, was born in 1893, one of nine children born to Patrick McGeever (b.1843 ) and Honora Finn (b.1853). She was perhaps 20 or 21 years old when she arrived in port at Ellis Island, New York. The events surrounding her migration are mostly lost in time, but as a cook, she would have lived in the Twombly’s servants’ quarters. It was there that she met and fell in love with Thomas. They were married at the Church of the Assumption in Morristown. Then, on February 9, 1920, Thomas and Nellie Lynch boarded a White Star-Dominion Line ship named “The Baltic” and returned to Ireland to raise a family.

In the little village of Kildalkey, County Meath, they had my father, Peter, and four girls, Nora, Kathleen, Rosie, and Elizabeth. [http://www.kildalkeyvillage.com/gallery.html#pic25]

When my sister Patty and I were young, grandpa was a somewhat short old man with thick white hair and piercing blue eyes. He always wore trousers, suspenders, a white shirt and a vest where he kept his silver pocket watch on a long chain. He smoked a pipe and he had such a thick Irish brogue that I sometimes couldn’t understand him. He kept beautiful flower beds in the backyard and carefully tended his rose bushes by the white rail fence out front.

But granny was always the central figure. She was a bit plump with soft round features that belied her underlying strength of personality. She always wore long flowered dresses and shoes with thick, short heals. She never wore shorts or pants. She had dark grey hair kept under a hair net. She was the center of activity, which often involved food. Watching her moving about in her kitchen was my favorite pastime during visits. She would put on a clean linen or a flowered apron and move around so quickly and easily it was like a dance. She was organized and never unsure of what she had to do next. When she made Irish Soda bread she measured everything by eye or by feel and made it look quick and easy. She whipped up custards and soufflés and made different sauces for the meats and vegetables she served during the holidays. Her cakes and desserts were beautiful and tasted amazing. Little did my sister and I know that this wasn’t typical Irish fare.

Our January visit to the Twombly mansion in 2019 was my sister’s first. Her enthusiasm was infectious. We walked around the elegant hallway, stared at the portraits and marveled at the Grand Ballroom. Patty wanted to see the kitchen but I had no idea where it was. She walked into one of the offices and met Mark, who works there. She introduced us as the grandchildren of two former servants which prompted him to tell us about the building and the times when they had worked there.

Mark told us how to find where the kitchen had been and about all the other rooms we would visit as we walked about. We learned that the barn-like building where our grandparents lived was still standing behind the Science Center. Across from it still stands a row of garages where twelve maroon Rolls Royces and other automobiles were kept. My grandfather would have worn a matching maroon livery uniform when he drove those cars. He told us there was once a tunnel between the servant’s quarters and the basement of the mansion where my grandmother and other servants would walk back and forth so they wouldn’t be seen on the grounds of the Estate. Perhaps most surprising of all, we learned that Nellie Lynch worked under the wealthiest and most famous private chef in the world.

Joseph Donon was a world renown chef who once fought for France during World War I. He was hired by Mrs. Twombly in 1917 to fulfill her request to give her “the best of the best.” He replaced most of the kitchen staff and hired his own workers who were loyal to him. Nellie may have stayed on because we have never heard of her working anywhere else before she married Thom.

Our recent visit to the Florham Estate made our family history come alive. We have a better idea of who these two immigrants and the social influences that help mold them.

The red building to the left is where the servants lived on the Twombly Estate. Directly across the driveway is a long row of garages where The Twombly’s many cars were stored and maintained.

A picture of the mansion and grounds taken from about a third of the distance to the servant’s quarters. A tunnel under this area allowed the servants to enter the home without being seen.

Florham Campus: A History of the Estate

https://view2.fdu.edu/campuses-and-centers/florham-campus/about-the-florham-campus/florham-campus-a-history-of-the-estate/