Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
Up since 4:15, unable to turn off a brain that gradually stirred into activity until it became a torrent of thoughts about work, taxes, and politics.
But first, for my New York friends, the view out my french door at Wyldswood this morning.
This is what 78 degrees and 91 percent humidity at 6:30 a.m. looks like, when the air conditioner has run all night. The whole place glazes over with condensation like a big coke bottle. No wonder we have such a mold problem down here.
Entering Saturday I've billed 42 hours this week, and 122 this month. One fifty is a good average month. I'll bill another ten or so over the weekend, just to keep up.
This coming Wednesday, as I look at my calendar, I see a Rule 7 conference in a federal case, involving a discovery issue. If there's anything more loathsome than a Rule 7 conference, it's a Rule 7 conference to discuss discovery. The federal courts imposed what seemed like a sensible requirement years ago, that the lawyers speak about a disputed matter before running to the courthouse and filing a motion asking a judge to decide the issue. Lawyers being lawyers, the net effect has often been to create one more billable event before the inevitable filing of the motion. It is usually a complete waste of time.
And discovery? Ye gods, how I hate disputes involving discovery. This was another groovy idea implemented nearly a century ago in our civil procedure rules. Back in the day, trials were like the wild west, with surprise witnesses and documents dramatically whipped out of briefcases in front of the jury, to the horror of the unsuspecting opposition. But no more. Now we can ask the other side to answer written questions under oath, produce documents, allow inspections of property or physical evidence. Finally, a level playing field, with everyone working from the same file.
Except, these are lawyers we are talking about. Discovery has become a billing bonanza, with junior lawyers sitting in warehouses filled with bankers' boxes reviewing files at $250 an hour while their bosses wrangle over work product immunity and whether a request is "reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence." The electronic age has been a veritable gold mine, because now the forty-ish lawyers are the only ones who remember enough law and know enough about technology to craft a proper ediscovery request or response (what in the hell is "native format", anyway? I picture a lawyer in a grass skirt with a bone through her nose, reading someone else's emails), raising their stock. Old guys like myself end up paying vendors hundreds or thousands of dollars to help us navigate this foreign land, so that's one more hand in the poor client's pocket.
And the name of the game for this tribe of "trial lawyers" who've generally never tried a case is to screw the other guy in discovery, to figure out a way not to produce anything useful through creative objections and interpretations of seemingly straightforward requests. I find the whole exercise worse than distasteful.
Wednesday's discussion will center on a challenge to the parties' designation of certain documents in a contract case as "confidential--attorneys' eyes only" per the terms of a stipulated protective order entered by the judge early in the case. There is a lengthy list of documents identified by bates stamp numbers (when you're dealing with a file containing thousands of digital documents, you'd better number each one or you'll never find it again) about which I'm expected to wrangle with some disagreeable south Florida lawyer who seems only to have this one very big case. He'll be loaded for bear. I'll be fumbling around trying to figure out what the hell is going on, glancing pleadingly at the sharp young associate who'll attend with me.
Because, see, I have eighty files, or maybe eighty-one. More than I can do. And most days I move from one file to the next like a speed dating exercise or a hospitalist on rounds at someplace where everyone is really, really sick, with only a few minutes to remember what this case is about before a judge, client, or opposing counsel appears on the screen. It's become disorienting.
Back in USAF Flight Safety School we learned all about cognitive task saturation, that condition sometimes afflicting pilots with fatal consequences. Take the mental workload of simply flying an airplane, which back then was a lot more demanding before sophisticated autopilots and GPS navigation. Now add in some weather. Now how about a flashing warning light, maybe indicating a hydraulic circuit is acting up. Now send a few antiaircraft tracers whizzing past the windscreen.
At some point the average Joe is just sitting there drooling, unable to address any of those functions, each of which on its own would be manageable, because he's trying to address all of them. That's when he flies into the ground.
And that's this moment in a nutshell. I need two young associates, two months ago.
So as all of that started rolling around in my head, I remembered my friend Bo Bo warning me about inadvertently becoming a New Yorker for tax purposes. So at five a.m. I looked it up and--Hey! Look at that! you really can accidentally become a resident of the Empire State.
I guess P's going to have to start flying down here for conjugal visits, because too many rolls in the hay in the shadow of the Finger Lakes could get a little pricey. The tax hit for me if that were to happen would amount to almost my starting salary as a baby lawyer in 1997. And on day 183 within the borders of the Excelsior State in any given year, apparently they hand you a spiedie and a Buffalo Bills stocking cap, and you're on the team.
Before 2017 it would not have mattered, because state income tax was entirely deductible right off the top for federal income tax purposes. But no more--now it's capped out at $10,000.00, for both of us.
How in the hell did that happen? You can thank those champions of tax relief for working stiffs, the Republican Party. Since we first had a federal income tax in 1913, state income and local property taxes were deductible, period. Over the years we developed very different views among the states regarding services, infrastructure, and personnel, with the far west and the northeast extracting lots of taxes but providing first world government. Meanwhile, down here in the banana republics of the South, they often don't impose state income tax at all, and if one drives our roads or peeks into our schools or the W-2s of our state employees, one sees the result.
Keep in mind those same southern states draw a disproportionate share of federal tax dollars. It's an important part of the story as the neo-Confederacy went solid red and the higher tax states turned solid blue.
Enter DJT, and that moment of national peril when the Rs also controlled Congress. That would be, well, 2017 and most of 2018.
And apparently their first order of business, under the deceptively named Tax Cuts and Job Act, was to cap out deductions for state and local taxes. The net result is that high earners in blue states now mostly subsidize the political lunacy in the South. It was a party-based money grab that no one talks about, particularly the tax hypocrites of the right. Then when they cut your pay by $30,000.00 as you stroke a check for your state income tax nut, they turn around and suggest you should move yourself and your business down here and avoid those taxes, straining the ability of the communities that built those businesses to survive as their less civic-minded burghers don Aloha shirts and point their U-Hauls south. It's all pretty despicable.
So, I guess the final irony of all that finds me playing Hank Reardon to Peg's Dagny Taggart, along with all of our northern, educated, high earner friends who get to pay the bill for that military retiree living in a Wewahitchka single-wide with Trump flags out in the yard.
Speaking of which . . .
I came upon this specimen as I was driving back from the gym yesterday morning.
So, an anti-abortion zealot judging by the license plate, with an obscene insult directed to a president the driver doesn't recognize as legitimate, thanking the demagogue of the moment for owning the libtards. The most chilling is that enigmatic little sticker to the right of the plate, a death's head popular with the motorcycle crowd and Hitler's SS, embossed with the American flag and capped with DJT's familiar coif. They want you to know they're coming for you, for me, I guess.
Of course, the actual driver appeared to be an androgynous geriatric who could barely see over the steering wheel. All of the seats were wrapped in bedsheets held in place by bungees. A yip yip dog peered bemusedly out of the rear window.
By all appearances, this person isn't really a threat to your author, hasn't knocked the top off of life, probably goes to the doc and pays through some federal program, maybe draws a retirement to which it never contributed, a retirement Peg and I (and Issac and Olivia and the rest of the productive class) pay for.
What the hell? Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.
I do worry about this country, and think in a way Adams was generally right in his observation about what it takes for a constitutional republic to succeed. We're only as good as our people.
But what is good, exactly? The person driving that Subaru may turn out to be the nicest little old person you every met, albeit sort of intellectually challenged. But stupid isn't bad, it's just stupid. And every society has a swath of stupidity running through it. Half the population has an IQ below 100, and they all have a right to be here, to find meaning and purpose in their lives.
I don't blame the doofuss driving that cheap little car for his or her benighted world view. I blame those who know better, who cynically manipulate the easily manipulated even if it wrecks the country that gave them all they have. Like the names on those bumper stickers, for starters.
I'm not optimistic about our future as a country, not at all. I think we're in the denouement that ends in collapse, perhaps slowly like the Romans, perhaps all at once like the Soviets. Either way, those of my generation at least got to live through the last of the good part.
On that cheery note, I'm off to mow the jungle outside that frosted window before it gets too hot, then back into the home office to work on files ahead of next week.
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