OPINION
6A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • WEDNESDAY, JUNE 7, 2017
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager
JEREMY FELDMAN, Circulation Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
Water
under
the bridge
Compiled by Bob Duke
From the pages of Astoria’s daily newspapers
10 years ago this week — 2007
Some North Coast residents believe Clatsop County is rushing through
the local approval process for the Bradwood Landing liquefied natural
gas project.
The county announced last week a report on the public safety impacts
of the project wouldn’t be complete until the end of July — well after the
county planning commission’s public hearing on the Bradwood land use
application July 10.
Astoria resident Peter Huhtala and the Columbia River Business Alli-
ance have asked county commissioners to delay the Bradwood Landing
LLC land use application hearing until the report is available for review.
Four 2007 Dr. Edward Harvey Awards for historic preser-
vation have been announced.
Winners are:
• Residential award, Ulrich Wendlberger of Munich, Ger-
many, for 997 16th St.;
• Publicly owned commercial award, The Doughboy
Monument;
• Privately owned commercial award, Banker’s Suite —
Day Spa at 1215 Duane St.:
• Outstanding citizen award, Rickenbach Construction.
Long Beach, Washington, Peninsula resident Jim Gardner has mem-
ories of what he was doing this week in 1944. He was a Quartermas-
ter Third Class on board the minesweeper USS Tide, taking part in the
D-Day invasion of Normandy.
Close to the French coast, Gardner’s vessel hit a mine off Utah Beach
after completing a sweep on June 7.
50 years ago — 1967
Top officials of Northwest Aluminum were due to arrive at
Clatsop Airport about noon in a Pacific Power & Light Co. air-
plane to inspect the 882-acre industrial site near Warrenton
where they hope to erect an aluminum reduction plant.
Most of us know of the bottom fishing industry’s fight to stay afloat in
a flood of foreign imports that are taking the U.S. market.
Another important local industry is in the same plight.
Clatsop’s 40 mink breeders, who operate a $2 million-a-year indus-
try, are joining other Oregon mink breeders in a campaign to persuade
Congress that there must be some relief from a flood of duty-free foreign
imports.
In 1966 imported mink seized 42 percent of the domestic market,
mink breeders here report.
“The mink industry is doomed unless we can get some relief from
Congress,” breeders declare.
Grimstad and Vanderveldt and Wullger and Warila will
probably begin cleanup and levelling the Warrenton site of
Northwest Aluminum’s $140 million aluminum plant next
week.
Engineering and soil and foundation analysts, along with
others, toured the site Thursday and said work would begin as
soon as possible to take advantage of the good weather.
Thorough inspection was given the mouth of the Skipanon
area where bauxite ore will be landed by ships from Australia.
75 years ago — 1942
The Daily Astorian/File
The USS Tide sinking off Normandy after hitting a mine June 7, 1944.
War burst upon Astoria with dramatic suddenness, as it did on most cit-
ies in the United States. There was the shock of Pearl Harbor, the uncer-
tain thrill of the first few blacked out nights, when planes were reported
over San Francisco and when no one knew when Astoria itself might taste
modern war in all its frightfulness and grim drama.
But after the first few hectic days Astoria quickly settled into a routine
not greatly different from that of peacetime. A person coming into town
from the hills, beyond the reach of radio, might not have known that war
had come, from all external appearances.
But changes were made slowly at first and then with increasing speed
as federal rulings marched in a procession that soon began to disrupt civil-
ian life. The draft was speeded up, production of automobiles, radios and
refrigerators was stopped and many businesses faced ruin, labor supply
became short, priorities made replacement of many articles difficult, gas-
oline quotas were cut, more men left for shipyards and airplane plants,
curbs were put on installment buying, sugar was rationed and ceilings
were imposed on prices and rent.
On the other hand, the economists might say that the basic economy
of the city had not been greatly changed, since the basis of Astoria’s econ-
omy is food-production, fishing and dairying; and all attempts will be
made to expand, instead of disrupt these lines. Production of timber is
likewise essential to the war and important to Astoria.
The lawless presidency
By DAVID LEONHARDT
New York Times News Service
D
emocracy isn’t possible
without the rule of law —
the idea that consistent prin-
ciples, rather than a ruler’s whims,
govern society.
You can read Aristotle, Montes-
quieu, John Locke or the Declara-
tion of Independence on this point.
You can also look at decades of
American history. Even amid bit-
ter fights over what the law should
say, both Democrats and Republi-
cans have generally accepted the
rule of law.
President Don-
ald Trump does
not. His rejec-
tion of it distin-
guishes him from
any other modern
U.S. leader. He has
instead flirted with
Louis XVI’s notion of “L’etat, c’est
moi”: The state is me — and I’ll
decide which laws to follow.
This attitude returns to the fore
this week, with James Comey
scheduled to testify on Thurs-
day about Trump’s attempts to sti-
fle an FBI investigation. I realize
that many people are exhausted by
Trump outrages, some of which
resemble mere buffoonery. But I
think it’s important to step back
and connect the dots among his
many rejections of the rule of law.
They are a pattern of his pres-
idency, one that the judicial sys-
tem, Congress, civic institutions
and principled members of Trump’s
own administration need to resist.
Trump’s view of the law, quite sim-
ply, violates American traditions.
Let’s walk through the major
themes:
Law enforcement,
politicized
People in federal law enforce-
ment take pride in trying to remain
apart from politics. I’ve been
talking lately with past Justice
Department appointees, from both
parties, and they speak in almost
identical terms.
They view the Justice Depart-
ment as more independent than,
say, the State or Treasury Depart-
ments. The Justice Department
works with the rest of the admin-
istration on policy matters, but
keeps its distance on law enforce-
ment. That’s why White House
officials aren’t supposed to pick up
the phone and call whomever they
want at the department. There is a
careful process.
Trump has erased this
distinction.
He pressured Comey to drop the
investigation of Trump’s campaign
and fired Comey when he refused.
Trump has called for specific pros-
ecutions, first of Hillary Clinton
and more recently of leakers.
The attorney general, Jeff Ses-
sions, is part of the problem. He is
supposed to be the nation’s head
law-enforcement official, but acts
as a Trump loyalist. He recently
held a briefing in the White House
press room — “a jaw-dropping vio-
lation of norms,” as Slate’s Leon
Neyfakh wrote. Sessions has pro-
claimed, “This is the Trump era.”
Like Trump, he sees little dis-
tinction between the enforcement
of the law and the interests of the
president.
respected the judiciary as having
the final word on the law. Trump
has tried to delegitimize almost
any judge who disagrees with him.
His latest Twitter tantrum, on
Monday, took a swipe at “the
courts” over his stymied travel
ban. It joined a long list of his
judge insults: “this so-called
judge”; “a single, unelected district
judge”; “ridiculous”; “so politi-
cal”; “terrible”; “a hater of Donald
Trump”; “essentially takes law-en-
forcement away from our coun-
try”; “THE SECURITY OF OUR
NATION IS AT STAKE!”
“What’s unusual is he’s essen-
tially challenging the legitimacy of
the court’s role,” the legal scholar
Charles Geyh told The Washington
Post. Trump’s message, Geyh said,
was: “I should be able to do what I
choose.”
The rule of
law depends
on a society’s
willingness to
stand up for it
when it’s under
threat. This
is our time of
testing.
Team Trump, above the law
Foreign governments speed
up trademark applications from
Trump businesses. Foreign offi-
cials curry favor by staying at his
hotel. A senior administration offi-
cial urges people to buy Ivanka
Trump’s clothing. The president
violates bipartisan tradition by
refusing to release his tax returns,
thus shrouding his conflicts.
The behavior has no prece-
dent. “Trump and his administra-
tion are flagrantly violating ethics
laws,” the former top ethics advis-
ers to George W. Bush and Barack
Obama have written.
Again, the problems extend
beyond the Trump family. Tom
Price, the secretary of health and
human services, has used political
office to enrich himself. Sessions
failed to disclose previous meet-
ings with Russian officials.
Their attitude is clear: If we’re
doing it, it’s OK.
Citizens, unequal.
Courts, undermined.
Past administrations have
Trump and his circle treat them-
selves as having a privileged status
under the law. And not everyone
else is equal, either.
In a frightening echo of despots,
Trump has signaled that he accepts
democracy only when it suits him.
Remember when he said, “I will
totally accept the results of this
great and historic presidential elec-
tion — if I win”?
The larger message is that peo-
ple who support him are fully
American, and people who don’t
are something less. He tells elabo-
rate lies about voter fraud by those
who oppose him, especially Afri-
can-Americans and Latinos. Then
he uses those lies to justify mea-
sures that restrict their voting.
(Alas, much of the Republican
Party is guilty on this score.)
The efforts may not yet have
swung major elections, but that
should not comfort anyone. They
betray the most fundamental dem-
ocratic right, what Locke called
“the consent of the governed.”
They conjure a system in which
the benefits of citizenship depend
on loyalty to the ruler.
Trump frequently nods toward
that idea in other ways, too. He
still largely ignores the victims
of terrorism committed by white
nationalists.
Truth, monopolized
The consistent application of
laws requires a consistent set of
facts on which a society can agree.
The Trump administration is try-
ing to undermine the very idea of
facts.
It has harshly criticized one
independent source of informa-
tion after another. The Congres-
sional Budget Office. The Bureau
of Labor Statistics. The CIA. Sci-
entists. And, of course, the news
media.
Trump attacks the media almost
daily, and McClatchy has reported
that these attacks will be part of
the Republicans’ 2018 campaign
strategy. Trump has gone so far as
to call journalists “the enemy of
the people,” a phrase that authori-
tarians have long used to paint crit-
ics as traitors. “To hear that kind of
language directed at the American
press,” David Remnick, the editor
of The New Yorker, has said, “is an
emergency.”
All Americans, including the
president, should feel comfortable
criticizing the media. (I certainly
do.) Specific media criticisms are
part of the democratic cacoph-
ony. But Trump is doing something
different.
He demonizes sources of infor-
mation that are not sufficiently
supportive. He tells supporters
that they can trust only him and
his loyal mouthpieces to speak the
truth. La vérité, c’est moi.
The one encouraging part of
the rule-of-law emergency is the
response from many other parts
of society. Although congres-
sional Republicans have largely
lain down for Trump, judges —
both Republican and Democratic
appointees — have not. Neither
have Comey, the FBI, the CBO,
the media or others. As a result, the
United States remains a long way
from authoritarianism.
Unfortunately, Trump shows no
signs of letting up. Don’t assume
he will fail just because his actions
are so far outside the Ameri-
can mainstream. The rule of law
depends on a society’s willingness
to stand up for it when it’s under
threat. This is our time of testing.