Then
January 3, 2014
The Rogue Party and the Constitution
I keep a copy of the Constitution on my Kindle because I have a brain like a sieve lately and I have to keep checking back to see what it does say and what it doesn’t say. We the people, for all the idealistic talk about freedom, were given almost no power by our forefathers. There were popular elections but there was always a layer of the educated elite between the popular vote and the actual result of any given vote. Today the popular vote does determine our representatives in the House and our senators in the Senate, but that extra layer still exists in the form of the Electoral College when we elect our President and Vice President.
I think that we the people have seen this year how a party can skew elections at the state level. In the case where one party controls the executive office (governor) and the legislative branch (which varies from state to state) that party can control the state right down to the local level. We have seen this in a number of states e. g. Virginia and North Carolina. A party is allowed periodic redistricting and can carve out those tortuously gerrymandered districts to give their candidates an advantage as long as the population in the district remains stable and many of these districts are stable for a long time. The party in power at the state level can meddle with voting in many, quite creative and less-than-savory ways as 2013 has shown us.
The party, with only its state and local control, has been able to affect governance at the federal level. It has invented, for example, the tactic of forcing a sitting federal legislator into a primary at the state level to force everyone in that party at the federal level to toe the party line.
I suppose people who have followed politics forever are unsurprised by how venal the shenanigans can be. These things that the Republicans do don’t even sound legal, but somehow they are. These shady party politics and dirty tricks take elections, once again, out of the hands of we the people and put them into the hands of wealthy citizens who are not part of our government, who multiply their vote through pressuring the party they are supposed to be backing and who therefore run our government without being elected to do so. The party in power sets up an unfair playing field and elects whoever its political action groups dictate. If we are vigilant, as some of our news people have been, we might be able to stop this, but sometimes even vigilance doesn’t work and the party gets to elect whoever it wants.
So I scroll through the Constitution on my Kindle and I look for the part that protects we the people from a political party gone wild (rogue is their word), but the Constitution will not help us with this because a lot of voter laws came out of the legislature in order to flesh out the Constitution. Political Action Committees are not in the Constitution. There are no instructions to we the people that tell us what to do if our legislators refuse to legislate and hold the whole process of governance at bay until they get their way (even though they actually had lost the last Presidential election).
We the people will not find our current situation addressed at all in our Constitution because what this party, the Republican Party is doing is outside the scope and sense of our Constitution. They are seriously out of order and we the people were not given a way to restore order unless and until we hold a new election as specified in our Constitution. But we know the election has been “fixed” so how can we have any confidence in the one remedy our forefathers did give us? You can’t use a rogue election to reign in a rogue political party. The Republicans don’t want to destroy their own party. They are trying to do away with Democrats. Don’t any of our country’s many political experts have any ideas about how we can halt this coup? I am not interested in waiting until 2016 to see what will happen then. I want a level playing field now.
Since our Constitution apparently has loopholes that allow devious politics to subvert it, it seems obvious that some serious revisions are needed to keep our US Constitution up to the challenge of 21st century attempts to change America from a Democracy to a Plutocracy (or an Oligarchy).
This is the view from the cheap seats.
Now
May 24, 2019
Gutting the Constitution
On April 21, 2019, Donald Trump, the President of the US called President Zelenskyy, the newly elected President of Ukraine, to ask for a favor. He wanted dirt on Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden in order to help him win the Presidential election in 2020. It might have been less of a scandal if he had not threatened to cut off military aid to Ukraine that had been passed in the US Congress. Apparently our legal system has gotten so complex that it is almost impossible to prove what constitutes a “quid pro quo.” Despite the Byzantine twisting of America’s laws it was clearly a scandalous thing for an American president to propose that US aid would not be forthcoming if the “favor” was not agreed to. When you make an oath to uphold the Constitution you at least ought to know what it says in our documents and laws, and if you don’t know you should listen to your advisors. Trump proved as time went on that he had no intimate knowledge of our laws and only listened to advisors when they agreed with whatever he wanted to do.
So Democrats used our impeachment process to hold Trump responsible for breaking US laws. Republicans take an oath on the same Constitution as Democrats do but they refused to act and would not convict Trump of soliciting a foreign power to help with an election, or of withholding funding already approved by Congress as a quid pro quo for a personal favor.
This weakened the powers of checks and balances that it at the heart of our republic/democracy.
Most of us clearly accept that the activities of January 6th can be described as an insurrection. We also see a connection between Trump’s inflammatory rally on the Ellipse and the mob attacks that took place at the Capital on that day. We have learned that there was plenty of advanced planning offering several ways that a free and fair election could be overturned. We know that Trump allies met at the Willard Hotel to plan ways to change the electoral college vote if the insurrectionists did not succeed in stopping the certification of the real electoral college votes. Eastman and others came up with a plan to certify fake electors in seven states. This was accomplished and the fake certifications were sent to the National Archives where they were recognized as fakes and the election was not overturned. Most of us know that nothing happens in Trumpworld without Trump’s knowledge but courts require proof. Trump was impeached by the Democrats for his obvious connections to the events of January 6th, but once again the Republicans in the Senate would not convict him and so he was not removed from office.
Again the powers given to the people in the Constitution to remove a bad president were undermined by one political party whose loyalty to Trump is more important than their oath to protect the US Constitution. This was a second blow to our Constitution and to our democracy/republic.
Our Fourteenth Amendment makes it clear that anyone who takes any part in an insurrection can never again run for or hold public office. Trump should be barred from running for President again, but he isn’t. The 8 Senators who tried to block certification of the electoral college votes and the 121 Representatives who also voted against certification should also be blocked from running, but their activities on January 6th have become almost a badge of honor to Republicans and they are boldly running once again because the law does not provide for any enforcement if one party will not act to employ Constitutional laws. The Department of Justice will not want to take a stand on this most likely and the Supreme Court is packed with right-wing judges.
The Fourteenth Amendment offered important protections for our democracy/republic that are now useless. Will these powers ever be restored? Not if the Republicans complete their slow-rolling coup to hold on to governance for as long as they possibly can.
When Republicans took away the pre-clearance section of the Voting Rights Act they began to change voting rules in a number of key states to ensure that Republican would win and their attacks on voting have gotten bolder and soon we will begin to doubt if America can even hold a free and fair election. Since they will now install friendly Secretaries of State to count the votes we may be able to hold a free and fair election but not able to trust the outcome of that election. These actions resemble the post Civil War tests and the Jim Crow voting tests to block black votes except this time the hope is to nullify Democratic Party votes (still discriminatory against black Americans because large numbers of Americans of African Descent vote for Democrats). Blocking any citizen from casting their vote or having their vote accurately counted undermines the Constitution and in fact the very bedrock of our democracy/republic.
Now we have the “originalists” on the Supreme Court, who are clearly allies of the Republicans gutting our constitution, informing Americans that they will take away any right or law that they determine is not in line with the thinking of our Founders, as interpreted by these proclaimed “originalists”. They say that Roe is not rooted in our documents, but they don’t have any problem with Citizens United v FEC or the ruling that corporations are people and therefore have free speech and in an election money is speech, also not in line with our Founders.
How many attacks can there be on our Constitution and our laws before our democracy/republic bears no resemblance to the nation we built over time and the expectations about how that nation functions? How long before the states have all the power and the federal government has only an omnipotent executive officer, the President of the United States? How long before America becomes an authoritarian state? If you are a citizen and you want to restore the strength of our Constitution and our laws you must vote these people out of office. Whatever your conscience tells you about how your family has always voted, this time you must vote with the Democrats or lose your autonomy forever.
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