“My Duty Is To Call It Out.”

A judge and a senator offer moral clarity in a time of monsters.

U.S. District Court Judge William Young and U.S. Senator Tina Smith

There’s been intense focus these past months on how the White House has exceeded its constitutional authority, and how Republicans have permitted a dangerous erosion of the rule of law.

There’s been less attention, however, on a more overarching question: Do we still want to live in a moral society, governed by good people?

Judges and elected officials who want to Make America Good Again are speaking out, not just against the criminality or illegality of this regime’s actions, but against its fundamental lack of humanity and decency.

These moments of moral clarity are rare; the fact that two occurred yesterday caught my attention.

“Have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?”

Through two of its recent executive orders, the White House attacked so-called “DEI” programs by withholding NIH research funding for projects related to racial minorities and LGBTQs. Plaintiffs challenged those orders as illegal impoundments of grants already appropriated by Congress.

Judge William Young, a conservative appointed by Ronald Reagan, held a hearing yesterday in federal district court in Massachusetts to consider whether the White House had legitimate grounds to withhold the funds. But in open court, per reporting by Politico, Judge Young went much further than this question, directly accusing the White House of “appalling” and “palpably clear” discrimination.

“I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years. I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this,” Judge Young excoriated.

“I have the protection that the founders wrote into the Constitution, along with imposing upon me a duty to speak the truth in every case. I try to do that,” he said, issuing a stern rebuke to the government. “What if I didn’t have those protections? What if my job was on the line, my profession... Would I have stood up against all this? Would I have said, ‘You can’t do this’?”

“I am hesitant to draw this conclusion—but I have an unflinching obligation to draw it—that this represents racial discrimination and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community,” the judge said in a departure remarkable for any jurist, let alone a conservative with his seniority.

I say departure because Judge Young wasn’t there to decide whether the executive orders were moral, only if they were lawful. But he spoke out anyway.

“This represents racial discrimination and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community,” Judge Young said. “That’s what this is. I would be blind not to call it out. My duty is to call it out.”

As Politico further noted,

Judges have routinely and repeatedly found that the administration’s race to terminate contracts, dismantle agencies and deport immigrants has been tainted by illegality and violations of due process, but few have mounted such a broad-based rejection of the administration’s policies themselves.

“You are bearing down on people of color because of their color,” Judge Young said. “The Constitution will not permit that.”He added, “Have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?”

“Have you absolutely no conscience? No decency?”

In Washington, D.C., another calling out of those in power unfolded yesterday.

Over the weekend, Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) had lost her friend, former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, who was assassinated along with her husband in their home by a man posing as a police officer. The horror and terror of that politically-motivated killing only increased after the murderer’s list of other targets was made public and we learned it included many other high level state Democratic officials.

As happens unfailingly with the terminally online right, conspiracy theories soon circulated. They claimed, without basis, that the killer was actually a disgruntled leftist out for vengeance. These false assertions were amplified by bad faith actors, including Elon Musk and Laura Loomer, even though it was already clear from public records, video recordings of the killer, and press interviews given by his roommate that the assassin was a die-hard Trump voter and an anti-abortion religious extremist.

Nevertheless, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) decided he would use the murders to “own the libs.” He posted a picture of the killer, adding a caption, “Nightmare on Waltz Street” in a clumsy reference to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

Sen. Lee also posted another image of the murderer, adding: “This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way.”

Sen. Smith wasn’t going to stand for this. In the Senate building, she tracked Lee down, pulling him out of a GOP meeting. Out in the hallway, she let him know directly “how painful that was, and how brutal it was, to see that on what was just a horribly brutal weekend.”

Image courtesy of Semafor

According to Smith, Lee “didn’t say a lot, frankly.” She added, “I think he was a bit stunned.”

That’s the way it often is with online trolls. They, or the staff they let speak for them, do not ever witness the pain or harm they are causing. They measure success by likes and reshares, along with praise from people like Jesse Watters and Steve Bannon. But Smith crossed that digital divide and called out Lee in person. He was left speechless because he never gave a moment’s thought to how his words and images might cause even further trauma.

Sen. Smith spoke to CNN about why she had sought Lee out in person.

“I wanted him to know about the consequence[s] of his words. And I went to him and I said, ‘You know, your message on social media showed the image of the man who killed my friend ... and your message was, this is what happens? You need to take responsibility and accountability for what you are saying and doing out there in the social media world.’ And I wanted him to hear that from me directly.”

Smith wasn’t the only one to respond to Lee’s posts. One of her senior aides emailed Lee’s staffers directly, and the text of that message is worth reading in its entirety:

I knew Melissa Hortman. Many people in this office did. She was a longtime friend of Senator Smith’s, who had seen her hours before she was murdered. So you’ll forgive my candor as I speak through enormous grief.

It is important for your office to know how much additional pain you’ve caused on an unspeakably horrific weekend. I am not sure what compelled you or your boss to say any of those things, which, in addition to being unconscionable, also may very well be untrue.

But that is not the point. Why would you use the awesome power of a United States Senate Office to compound people’s grief? Is this how your team measures success? Using the office of US Senator to post not just one but a series of jokes about an assassination—is that a successful day of work on Team Lee? Did you come into the office Monday and feel proud of the work you did over the weekend?

Let’s recap Saturday so you fully understand what Minnesota was going through. Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered. Sen. Hoffman and his wife were shot numerous times and remain hospitalized. By the grace of God it appears they will survive. Senators are discovered to be on a hit list of an armed man on the run—Senator Lee’s colleagues. And the decision of the office of Senator Mike Lee was not to publicly condemn the violence or to express condolences to her shattered children—it was to intimate that Melissa and Mark somehow deserved this? By making jokes? Did you have any consideration for the survivors in her family? For the Hoffmans in the hospital? For their families?

You exploited the murder of a lifetime public servant and her husband to post some sick burns about Democrats. Did you see this as an excellent opportunity to get likes and retweet? Have you absolutely no conscience? No decency?

I pray to God that none of you ever go through anything like this. I pray that Senator Lee and your office begin to see the people you work with in this building as colleagues and human beings. And I pray that if God forbid, you ever find yourselves having to deal with anything similar, you find yourselves on the receiving end of the kind of grace and compassion that Senator Mike Lee could not muster.

Lastly I suggest you take a few minutes today to read about Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark. They were remarkable people. Here’s a story in the St. Paul Pioneer press called “Melissa Hortman: Once a teenager with a job making burritos, she became a powerful MN lawmaker who trained service dogs.”

She was a force. And a human being. And I beg of you to exercise some restraint on social media as we continue to grieve.

Ed Shelleby

Office of Senator Tina Smith

Sen. Lee has avoided questions from reporters since, but his two horrific posts still remain up.

**UPDATE: Under pressure, Sen. Lee has now deleted those posts.

Ending the MAGA Trump era

I’ve always maintained that right-wing MAGA extremism contains the seeds of its own destruction. It feeds on ever-increasing levels of cruelty and dehumanization, meaning a self-proclaimed “based” senator like Mike Lee (or any of the other online, attention-seeking GOP elected officials) cannot garner ever more support and ever more small dollar donations without seeking to outdo the last horrific thing.

Like addicts chasing ever more elusive highs and fixes, it will all eventually come crashing down on them.

Indeed, we have already reached the stage where they will mock rather than condemn a political assassination, all in pursuit of online clout and bragging rights among an increasingly desensitized and amoral base of voters. We were well on this road when Paul Pelosi was attacked by a hammer-wielding maniac, and all the right came back with was laughter and more false conspiracies.

Theirs is a vapid, cruel and dangerous pursuit, but we know how it ends.

Our work ahead doesn’t just comprise seizing back the reins of government and reestablishing the rule of law and accountability. As Judge William Young, Sen. Tina Smith and Ed Shelleby bravely demonstrated, we must also make the moral case to the public and win back the soul of America from those who have us all accept monsters in our midst.

Wrong is wrong. As Judge Young declared, it’s our collective duty to call it out. And as Tina Smith’s office wrote so eloquently, we must demand of our leaders, and of this nation, a conscience and basic human decency.

Such a call, delivered at the peak of national hysteria and the Red Scare of the 1950s, famously ended the long nightmare of the McCarthy era. We must deliver the call again today, and ensure that it resounds across this nation, to truly bring about the end of the MAGA Trump era.