Not Unprecedented
I awoke this morning to yet another claim that something was unprecedented; a hurricane hitting Florida. When I read the article it got worse.
This storm will bring deadly surge to the Florida Panhandle and Big Bend coast and is not comparable to anything we have seen before,” the National Weather Service forecast office in Tallahassee said in a warning just after 1 a.m. ET.
Yet, in the very same article reads, “below the fold”, thusly:
Only eight major hurricanes on record have passed within or near the projected landfall of Michael, and only three of those (Eloise 1975, Opal 1995 and Dennis 2005) occurred in the past 100 years.
So, it has happened before. The storm is moving “so fast” it is expected to “only dump 6–10+ inches” of rain before passing into the Atlantic. An article on The Weather Channel website yesterday carried the headline of Michael being the strongest to hit the panhandle “in 13 years”, yet the fine print at the bottom says it is no longer being updated and links to a “new” article that instead carries the headline “Michael Strengthens to an ‘Extremely Dangerous’ Category 4 Hurricane”. Really. Do we have any category 4 hurricanes striking the U.S. that are not “extremely dangerous”?!
Now, none of that belittles the current storm’s risk. But it does highlight a problem in the press and politics. Every time I see “unprecedented” this is becoming my reaction:
We’re told that a hurricane hitting Florida is unprecedented, that the will be “not comparable” to the previous hurricanes despite previous storms hitting Florida and killing thousands. We’re told that the political division in this country is at “unprecedented levels” despite there being an actual civil war in our history.
The Republicans refusing to vote on Garland at all is supposed to be unprecedented. Yet a sitting Congress refusing to vote on a Supreme Court nomination by the opposing party’s President has happened repeatedly. Indeed the first time the Democrats did it was to the Whig Party. Nor was the reason given new. The Democrats did it for that very reason three times to the same President in the same term so their incoming guy could nominate someone.
Micou’s nomination was not acted upon by the Democratic-led Senate as it was late in the session and Franklin Pierce also a Democrat, was scheduled to succeed Fillmore as President on March 4, so not acting on Micou’s nomination would give Pierce the opportunity to submit a nomination of his own.[9] Pierce nominated John Archibald Campbell on March 21, and Campbell was confirmed by the Senate on March 25.[10] — Wikipedia
That the Democrats used delay and stall tactics to prevent the opposing party (Whig) from seating a justice by tabling the first nomination, postponing the second nomination, then refusing action on the third back then shows that even the claims of the Democrats’ actions this year as “unprecedented” are not new either. Even the claims of the Republicans “rushing” the process (Kavanaugh has the distinction of being in the ten longest times from nomination to confirmation) as being unprecedented is demonstrably false in the reference above: the Democrat nomination took only four days.
Some have pointed out how much our current President uses the term to describe his candidacy — and calling that unprecedented. Yet the very same observation and claim was made about Obama in his first years in office. Obama was supposedly taking office at a time of “unprecedented challenges” and frequently referred to what he was doing as “unprecedented”. I think George Washington could make that claim. Another contender would be Andrew Johnson who took office after Lincoln was assassinated — just after that civil war was concluded. The plot to kill Lincoln was also intended to kill Johnson and the Secretary of State, William Seward. There are many Presidents who took office under times of greater tension, division, and challenges than either Obama or Trump.
Even the rhetoric we see bandied about isn’t unprecedented. We even have a political cartoon on the Whig Party where the candidate is drawn as sitting on top of a literal pile of skulls with a sword in hand. We are supposed to think the furor over Trump vs. appointments and firings is unprecedented. Yet lets go back just to Johnson as mentioned above for but one example.
Johnson was a Democrat, and was opposed by the Republican controlled congress — which impeached him. On what grounds? Firing an appointee. You see, Johnson assumed the office after Lincoln (the Republican POTUS) was killed and Johnson’s would-be assassin got cold feet about it. Johnson then gave amnesty to Confederate officials — who then essentially took the governments of said states over and started implementing anti-black laws. But what drew the official ire was his firing of Secretary of War Stanton. Stanton was opposed to how lenient Johnson was against former confederate officials and the post-war reconstruction efforts.
You see, under Lincoln the land that was confiscated from confederate slave owners was divided up and given to freed slaves. Johnson reversed that and gave it back to the previous owners as part of his amnesty for them. Stanton was publicly against this, something Johnson could not let go so he tried to let Stanton go. However, this ran afoul of the Tenure of Office Act in which the Congress had tried to prevent the POTUS from removing a political appointee without Senate approval if the office required Senate confirmation in the first place.
Stanton’s response to this was, well maybe it was unprecedented. The first tiem he tried the case went to court and the Supreme Court refused to hear it. So Johnson tried again. Again we may actually have an unprecedented response: “Stanton refused to yield, barricading himself in his office”. This lead to the first impeachment of a President in U.S. history. It would have been an unprecedented un-presidenting if it had succeeded. But it came down to a single vote margin in the Senate which allowed Johnson to stay in office.
Yet we are to believe that today’s tempest in a teapot over these things is “unprecedented”, that the political division is at “unprecedented levels”. Even the “guilty by accusation, prove your innocence” we recently saw regarding the SCOTUS nominee is not without precedent. The Republicans often used the phrase “witch hunt” and the Democrats often tried the defense of “it isn’t a criminal trial” against their rejection of the presumption of innocence.
Yet the witch trials were more often than not, not a criminal trial but a public opinion one. The witch trials were almost always used to take down poltical or economic opponents. They were also used against minorities who would not be defended — such as slaves or native American servants. Indeed, in some of the most famous examples once the public trials had moved into an actual court trial the charges either fell apart or new “evidence” was allowed.
While many may reference the Salem witch trials, they often leave out how the process fell apart. As it happened the girls making the accusations realized the power they held. They enjoyed the spotlight and the ability to take anyone down on their word alone. Slowly it was realized this was what was happening. Interestingly it was when the girls started accusing the more liberal (at the time) members of society that pushback began. Without the presumption of innocence the allegations made by these girls literally cost people their lives based on nothing more than their “testimony”. It wasn’t stopped until their “movement” “went to far” when they began accusing a wide range of people in power — men and women alike.
So even this present scenario is not without precedent. We don’t have to go back that era to see this, however. During the drug war craze Florida passed a law to make someone guilty by default and required them to prove their innocence. More specifically the Florida legislature had passed a law removing the “mens rea” requirement on possession of an illegal substance. Before that the government had to prove the accused knew they were carrying illegal substances. The change was to make them prove they did not know. This distinction is important. It important because it is assumption of guilt.
The Florida district court ruled it facially unconstitutional to presume guilt. However, a key facet of why is that of pubic stigma. The court ruled, using a Supreme Court case’s “guidelines” from a previous case (Shelton), that being labelled a “drug offender” constituted social stigma, so due process was required — even if the legal penalties were slight. Consider that a while. Even if the conviction carried no legal penalties, the social stigma of being labelled a drug offender meant due process was required. So even if we remove the criminal nature of the recent tempest we see that it isn’t that unprecedented even in modern times.
Even this posting is not without precedent. I am not the first to be calling out this problem of misusing and overusing the word “unprecedented”, merely the latest. What would be unprecedented is if politicians and members of the media ended their abuse of the word. If reporters challenged claims of things as unprecedented — and showed where it it isn’t — whether made by other media people or politicians, and if politicians did the same that may actually be setting a precedent. I’d love for that to happen, but I am not holding my breath. It would be, after all, apparently be unprecedented.
