Donald Trump, the latest iteration of Mrs. Frothingham of 1927

By

David Gottfried

A couple of days ago, I read that Musk or Trump said that they can ditch USAID programs if they find them morally unsound. Instantly, my mind careened back in time to the Fall of 1982 and a case, in Civil Procedure, which set forth the saga of Mrs. Frothingham.

Mrs. Frothingham was just another super rich White Protestant bitch who had been nurtured by the spleen and savagery of John Calvin, a Protestant theologian who said that some people were absolutely, irrevocably destined to go to Hell. (I think Calvinism provides the theological basis for fascism. If you believe some people are permanently tainted by the mark of the devil, you will be more amenable to draconian solutions, final solutions if you will.)

In any event, Mrs. Frothingham fought for her hidebound political philosophy in the Courts. She brought a suit against the Secretary of the Treasury, Mellon, to enjoin his expenditure of federal funds to provide meals for starving, pregnant women. She held that if a pregnant woman were poor, she probably had sex outside of marriage, her baby was a damnable bastard, and suffering in Poverty was a sensible form of punishment justly deserved. She said that as a taxpayer she was being hurt because about 2 cents of her tax bill was being used to provide food to starving but sinful people.

The Courts in those days were conservative (Half of the Supreme Court consisted of old railroad company executives.), but they weren’t THAT conservative. They knew that if one person could nix a program simply because he thought it was immoral, then just about any program in the federal budget could be destroyed. For example, if puritans could nix programs to feed starving pregnant women (Because some of them had sex outside of marriage), then antiwar people could nix all defense expenditures on the grounds that killing people is immoral. The Court flatly said: The fact that one’s taxes paid for a program doesn’t give one the right to nix that program.

The Courts ought to use that logic to Quash and Negate the Musk-Trump coup to destroy USAID and other salubrious programs.

I checked my computer, and I found that I wrote a comic poem about Mrs. Frothingham in 2004:

..

Frothingham v Mellon

..

Old Mrs. Frothingham is Frothing at the Mouth

Splenetic, quite kinetic, she is ready for a bout

For morals and laissez faire she’s ardent and quite stout

Preening and queenly she glowers in her redoubt

..

Old Mr. Mellon shouldn’t aid a starving girl

In none of those urchin oysters can be found a sterling pearl

The slatterns and sirens and red banners they’ll unfurl

Must be banned like contraband, or manners are in a whirl

..

So Old Mrs. Frothingham commenced a legal suit

Propounding special theories very bright and quite astute

She pays plenty of taxes; that’s a fact you can’t dispute

That gives her standing to fight girls of ill repute

..

The Court in the twenties was hidebound and leaned right

A bunch of retired railroad men whose words were steeped in spite.

Applauding the status quo and the economic blight

The workers who couldn’t strike, the poor morose, contrite

..

But even the hoary Court had an inkling of sense and logic

They knew “taxpayer standing” was unsound, quite idiotic

If any taxpayer could stop a program he thought toxic

What would become of our mores Democratic

..

And so Mrs. Frothingham, dejected, lost her case

The wretched of the earth failed to stay in their sorry place

The Eighteenth Century certainties she staunchly did embrace

Were falling by the wayside and would wither without a trace

The last line of that poem said that the 18th Century certainties were being anulled by modernity. If we don’t stop Trump and Musk, they will operate like a time machine, sending us back, back, back to the rigid, authoritarian past.