Our Constitution Guarantees America Will Never Be a True Democracy

  Never has it been clearer than it is today that America can never be a true democracy, because the U.S.  Constitution prevents that.

It starts with the U.S. Senate, which gives two votes to every state regardless of population. Public policy scholars Michael Ettlinger and Jordan Hensley figure that in the current Senate, “41 Republican senators representing as few as 75 million people can block most legislation from even coming to a vote — thwarting the will of a group of Democratic and Republican senators representing as many as 270 million Americans.”

The Constitution did not arise from a consensus of like-minded founding fathers. Rather it was a compromise between the highly populated northern states, which wanted a democratically represented Senate, and the lesser populated southern states, which wanted equal power in the Senate. We are stuck with that situation because amending the Constitution itself takes a 2/3rds vote in both houses of Congress then ratification by three quarters of the states — something entirely unlikely for such a change.

    We’re lucky that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Reynolds v. Sims in 1964 that the 14th Amendment’s principle of equal protection required state legislatures to be based on one person-one vote. Prior to then, for example, Los Angeles County’s 6 million residents had the same representation in the California Senate as did the 400 people of Alpine County. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the majority opinion which has led to the practice of reapportioning both chambers of state legislatures based on population. Unfortunately, the Court could not make the same ruling for the U.S. Senate, in which Wyoming has the same representation as the states of California and New York.

This anti-democratic distribution of political power wasn’t so bad when men and women of goodwill were elected to the U.S. Senate, but today we have such conscious and conscientious ill-will  practiced primarily by the right wing representatives of the less populated states against the interests of the bigger states, that it’s totally disheartening.

Is this how the “American Experiment” ends? Is this how democracy dies in our country?  It’s hard to see any solution to what is essentially a structural flaw in our governance.

Meanwhile, back at the state level, gerrymandering has made it possible by ill-intentioned, power-hungry Republicans to solidify their control of state legislatures, such that in Texas, for example, the majority of the population can vote for Democratic candidates, but the majority of candidates elected in the same election are Republicans.

Michael Scherer of the Washington Post calculated that the Michigan legislature has a Republican majority although Democrats have won a majority of the popular vote there for a decade. In North Carolina in 2018, Democrats won 51% of the popular vote but got only 45% of the seats.

Not satisfied with the domination they created through gerrymandering, Republican-dominated legislatures in Georgia, Texas, and Florida, and other states with majority Democratic populations have worked aggressively to restrict voting rights. More than a dozen Republican-controlled states have enacted more than 30 new laws to suppress votes among heavily Democratic populations. They get away with it for one reason — because they can, pure and simple. In those states which have fraudulently created Republican control of their legislatures, the legislatures themselves manage the decennial reapportionment, guaranteeing continued gerrymandering and continued anti-democratic government.

It has been said that “the arc of history bends toward justice,” but it clearly bends against democratic rule. Sad but true.

 

How Did You Feel When a Friend, Partner, Employer/Employee Lied to You?

  When someone has lied to you, you probably started to question your relationship and whether they are lying to you again, right?

When a spouse cheated on you, were you able to forgive and forget? Or did it cause you to question when he or she was “working late” or going on a business trip without you?

When an employee or employer lied to you, did you “let it slide,” or did you begin to question future communications with him/her?

What’s most surprising about Trump supporters is that they know he is a habitual liar, yet they “let it slide” again and again and fall in line with his next set of lies. Here are some of the lies that surely they know were lies:

>  He said he didn’t have sex with porn star Stormy Daniels, but Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to paying for her silence and went to prison for it.

>  He excused his Access Hollywood  genital grabbing language as “locker room talk,” then claimed it wasn’t his voice.

>  He described the Jan. 6 insurrection as a “love fest.” I think we know better.

>  It rained on his inauguration, but he claimed the sun came out when he spoke. He claimed his inaugural crowd was bigger than Barack Obama’s despite photos proving otherwise.

>  He said that Covid-19 was a Chinese hoax, intended to help the Democrats.

>  He accidentally said that Alabama was at risk from Hurricane Dorian, but because he can’t ever admit he was wrong, he not only lied about it with a Sharpie, but he pressured government agencies to confirm his lie.

>  He said the head of the Boy Scouts called him to say his political speech at the 2017 Jamboree was “the greatest speech ever made to them,” but a Scouts spokesman said no such call had been made — Scouts honor!

A Trumper might still believe one or two of that short list of Trump’s lies, but my own experience as a human being is that it only takes one lie from someone to make me question everything that person says in the future. I suspect that’s true for Trumpers — except when it comes to Donald Trump.

That’s very cult-like. “Cult-45.”

So, how do you explain that behavior by Trump supporters, if not by saying it’s a cult?

I think it’s largely racial. Trump has been successful by playing on voter’s racial fears — fears triggered by the U.S. Census reporting that we’re approaching a time when white Americans will be in the minority. He compounded that by claiming that Mexican immigrants were criminals and rapists, or worse — a claim that no amount of factchecking would fix, since it played to what his base wanted to believe.

In the 2020 election, Trump pleaded with suburban women that they should love him, because Democrats would end single-family zoning, bringing inner city crime to the suburbs. Again, the race card. But suburban women didn’t buy it in enough numbers to carry the day for Trump in 2020.

So now we come to the Big Lie — that the election which Biden won resoundingly was “stolen” through fraud. Again, the truth doesn’t matter to Trump supporters. Lesson number one from Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and other autocrats: repeat a lie often enough and it will be taken as truth.

Trump supporters ultimately should realize they’ve been conned by Trump except for one big thing: he speaks to their fears. They are less wedded to Trump himself than to his philosophy. Tucker Carlson is banking on that.

The one lie which strikes closest to home for me as a journalist, and now a columnist, is that the mainstream media are puppets of the liberal left. I don’t expect any Trumper reading this to be convinced otherwise, and that’s the problem — how to change minds.

The Trump GOP thrives on playing to the fears of its base, but now it’s filling us non-Trumpers with fear that they could succeed, that they could take control of the Congress in 2022 and the White House again in 2024.

 

 

We Can Make America Great Again -- by Defeating Trump & His Enablers

In a previous column I asked what Trump and his supporters have in mind when they speak of “making America great again.” Are they harking back to the Jim Crow era; to when only men could vote and black voting was suppressed with poll taxes and literacy tests; to before the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts; or to when people with pre-existing conditions were unable to get health insurance at all and certainly not at the same price as others?

It seems that "MAGA" is devoid of meaning except to Trump’s white supremacist followers, but it means more and more to me every day. Yes, I want to return to the days before Trump was elected — back to a time when:

>  We had a president who was not a pathological liar and did not embolden white supremacists and other “deplorables” with thinly veiled dog whistles.

>  The United States of America was respected around the world for our values, and foreign governments could depend on us for stable and sensible foreign policies.

>  People with pre-existing conditions were guaranteed health insurance at the same rate as people without health challenges.

>  Health insurance for women cost the same as for men.

>  The president put the country first instead of his own personal interests and did not violate the constitution by profiteering from government business, accepting money (and loans) from foreign powers.

>  The Secretary of Labor did not try to gut protections for laborers.

>  The Secretary of Energy, like the president himself, knew that an economy based on fossil fuels was itself a dinosaur and that we need to transition to clean and renewable energy.

>  The mission of the Environmental Protection Agency was to protect the environment, not eliminate protections.

>  The president was not in the pocket of our number one enemy, Russia.

>  The Republican Party believed in free trade, not supporting trade wars and tariffs that only hurt American farmers and consumers.

>  We expected better than average morals, ethics and integrity from our politicians and punished those who fell short.

>  Our president didn’t promote violence against his opponents.

>  The president didn’t hide his tax returns and his foreign entanglements.

>  The president (and his supporters) saw value in marital fidelity.

>  We joined the rest of the world in committing to address the existential threat of climate change.

>  Our president supported our allies instead of ridiculing their leaders.

>  Scientists were respected by the president and both political parties, not ridiculed and insulted.

>  Voter suppression was not the stated policy of the president and his political party.

>  The president didn’t fall for and promote conspiracy theories, unable to censor his own public utterances.

>  The president (like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan) would admit their errors and apologize instead of doubling down. He practiced humility.

>  It was not considered presidential to engage in name calling and insults at every opportunity.

>  The president concentrated on running the country instead of being glued to his TVs and engaging in an absurd amount of spontaneous tweeting.

>  Loyalty to the country was more important than loyalty to the president.

>  Members of the president’s party were willing to speak out when they knew the president was wrong.

>  The media were respected instead of attacked for telling the truth and was not called “the enemy of the people.”

>  The president upheld the conservative principle of the rule of law.

Voters who don't want to make America great again as described above should ask themselves why. What kind of America do they want?