Harvard, Teaching the Constitution, For Trump

PERHAPS AS A PARTIAL RESPONSE to Harvard's recent and current difficulties with Donald Trump, the esteemed institution of higher learning is preparing to offer an online class on the Constitution of the United States. The class will be free of charge. Harvard, with an endowment exceeding forty billion dollars, the largest of any university in the world, can certainly afford it. It can also afford to withstand any conceivable financial damage done by Trump. Already the school has filed lawsuits against Trump because of the president's seemingly pointless, purely vindictive attack on Harvard, and on education generally. The good money says that eventually, maybe even by the Supreme Court, Trump's executive order withholding billions of dollars in scheduled government grants will be held unconstitutional. We may safely assume that the venerable old school will be able to muster a pretty salty team of lawyers to defend itself, and, ultimately, to defeat Trump. As always, it sees education as the method. After all, education is all Harvard has to offer, the intellect being its comfort zone. Someone or someones at Harvard possessing surpassing powers of analysis doubtless concluded that the root problem is that we the American people elected a total buffoon to the American presidency, and therefore might need a little brushing up, shall we say, in certain areas pertaining to good, well informed citizenship, including basic knowledge and understanding of the constitution. National remedial education, of a sort. Trump, never the sharpest file in the manicure kit, will doubtless miss a golden opportunitiy to issue the most ironic executive order ever; making the class mandatory for all Americans over a certain age, say, twelve. Nobody needs to learn the constitution more than the leader of the free world, his cronies, his supporters, and his enforcers. Trump, for example, evidently thought that it is constitutional for the president to change the constutution with the stroke of an executive order, as witnessed by the fact that his first executive order of his current administration summarily eliminated an integral part of the fourteenth amendment; the one giving all human beings birthright citizenship in the land of liberty. Trump has already signed more than a hundred fifty executive orders, an authoritarian governing by decree, and nearly all of them have been ruled unconstitutional by the federal judiciary, including many by far right wing judges appointed by Trump. They must have hated doing so, but they had no choice, owing to their obvious, blatant unconstitutionality. We already have a SCOTUS which ruled that the POTUS is above the law, which is a direct violation of the esteemed founding document. Refresher courses are good for all students. While we're at it, let's make sure that all members, SCOTUS included, of the federal judiciary, log on to the Harvard constitution class. At my local senior center in my little town in the deep American south, I suggested that we all take the class, so that we can all claim that we "attended Harvard". Not many takers. In any event, I had an ulterior motive. I reckoned that if every evangelical Christian MAGA member took and passed the class, the country might, just might, experience a cultural rennaissance, one in which we the American people increase our awareness of verifiable reality, with me doing my part at the local level. Again, not many takers. I must, however, confess, that the whole thing is probably a pipe dream.