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Colin McEnroe: It’s payback time for civic illiteracy

Shortly after the 2016 election, a pro-Trump commentator and person of blondeness named Scottie Nell Hughes appeared on Diane Rehm’s public radio show. Rehm asked her about complaints that Donald Trump lied all the time. Her answer: “People that say facts are facts. They’re not really facts. It’s like looking at ratings or a glass of half full water ... There is no such thing, unfortunately, anymore of facts.”

That last sentence has become semi-famous. Obviously, there are such things as facts. It is a fact, for example, that “as” and “of” are not interchangeable words.

I feel that people who omit the first part of the quote are doing readers a disservice. “A glass of half-full water” has a zen-like resistance to rational thought.


It wasn’t an isolated incident. On a TV show, Hughes had complained about a rap video that showed people throwing “mazel tov cocktails.”

Hughes then tried to become a paid contributor at Fox News and later claimed a Fox Business host raped her and forced her into a protracted coercive sexual relationship in return for airtime. Fox, which never did hire her, stopped booking her as a guest. She sued for retaliation and settled. She now appears daily on RT America, which is a branch of Russian state television. Her show is called “News Views Hughes.”

Presumably the Russians will straighten her out on that whole Molotov/mazel tov thing.

I don’t mean to make light of Hughes’s troubling career arc. It’s more that she is one of the many threads you can pull from the fabric of the past three years and get a good look at the paradoxes which now beset us.

In the space of less than a year, Hughes went from claiming that facts are not facts to pursuing a legal claim predicated entirely on her assertion of facts. And now she works for the Russians.

Hughes is just a convenient symbol. One of the causes of our current mess is our own collective civic illiteracy. Immediately after the 2016 election, I had people on my social media who wanted to know if Trump could be immediately impeached.

I had to explain that it would be necessary for him to be sworn in as president first and that his removal would require an unlikely two-thirds vote of the Senate. They didn’t know that. They just knew, vaguely, the word “impeach.”

The Annenberg Public Policy Center conducts regular studies of civics knowledge. The results are not pretty. For example, in Sept. 2016, they asked people if they knew any of the branches of government. 71 percent yes. 21 percent said no.

Then they asked the respondents to name as many branches as they could. 31 percent could not name any. I don’t know which is more depressing: the 31 percent who couldn’t name any branches or the 10 percent who had initially lied about it.

An additional 31 percent could name only one branch.

“Those unfamiliar with our three branches of government can’t understand the importance of checks and balances and an independent judiciary,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center.

“Checks and balances” refers to the idea the executive, legislative and judicial branches are intentionally set up so that the power of any one branch can be curbed by the other two. Sixty-two percent of American might not be able to grasp that idea, because they know only one branch or zero.

One of the people who appears to be in that large bloc is the president, who has repeatedly claimed Article II of the Constitution gives him the “right to do whatever I want.”

For example, when the White House refuses to provide documents and witnesses for the current impeachment inquiry, Trump is ignoring the check that the Constitution places on executive power. Congress could seek “balance” by pursuing a ruling from the Supreme Court.

What if the Supreme Court ordered the White House to produce the subpoenaed documents and witnesses? The president might still refuse.

Maybe that’s the moment when a group of Republican senators take the long walk to the White House and explain that they would have to vote for his removal if he openly defied two branches of government.

What if the president still said no? What if Senate then voted for his removal? What if the president refused to leave? What if Chief Justice John Roberts swore in Mike Pence as the 46th president, while Trump continued to insist he still held the office and rallied supporters to his flag?

Once upon a time, I would have regarded this type of speculation as frivolous. I now consider it plausible. And if it happened, only 30 to 40 percent of the population would grasp what was at stake. There would be a large group of people who would not understand that there is a well-established set of rules for resolving an impasse like this.

This morning I stumbled across something I wrote in October of 2016. “I started thinking about the presidency as a car. You could say that Bill Clinton kind of trashed the car with his sexual escapades and resulting impeachment. He drove its resale value down. And that George W. Bush and his administration further depreciated the car by smashing it into walls and dragging it along guardrails when he made torture a sanctioned policy and held people without charges. And then you could say that Barack Obama took better care of the car, started rotating its tires and keeping up with scheduled maintenance. But if you want to see what the car is like when its only value is parts or a tax write-off, let Trump have it.”

I’m pretty sure I thought that was funny, at the time.

Now it just seems uncannily prescient.

I need a drink. Definitely not a mazel tov cocktail.
