Thanksgiving...

As we head into the Thanksgiving holiday, I want to encourage all of us to be thankful that we live in this great country.  In spite of the obvious difficulty of the times, it is still the best place to be in this dangerous world we live in.  As long as we hold tight to our American ideals and weather the remaining time with leadership that seems to be only concerned with the success of selfish transactions, we will emerge from this period intact.  Our rehabilitation will be a challenge: to persuade the rest of the world that we in fact are the model for human rights, truth, honesty and the rule of law.  But there are enough of us in the end who will show the world a better way to live.  Resistance Strong!

The blush of victory from the Midterm elections is fading, and the magnitude of the job ahead is now replacing the elation of November 9^th with the realization that much work needs to be done.  We have had a Congress that has done very little constructive during the past two years or longer actually.  And with the Republicans having all the power over the recent past, the Democrats have been stymied in any effort to effect change or provide oversight of the Executive branch.

With the arrival of so many highly motivated freshman with a mandate from the voters to really try to do something constructive for the average citizen, the energy is palpable.  This new energy comes from campaigning to actually do work for the constituency the candidates represent…what a concept!  The House will now have the power to move legislation—healthcare, taxes, infrastructure, budget, etc.

The House will also have the power to investigate and to provide a check on the President.  Let’s hope they do what needs to be done, not out of spite, but out of a sense of responsibility to the people.  Revenge is not productive for the nation, and that must be our first priority—to heal the nation and try to find common ground with those on the Republican side that want to make progress on issues.  There will be many Republicans who still want to investigate Hillary Clinton because they are crazed and unhinged.  We must ignore them and work hard to marginalize those whose motives are still bent on trying to ‘lock her up’.

There are two additional important arenas that I think the Democrats must focus on right away: voter suppression and getting some answers on the Russian interference with our elections.

It became clear that our country has suffered a true cancer on our democracy in the form of depriving people the right to vote.  There have been systematic and persistent efforts for a very long time to deny minorities and economically depressed Democratic voters this guarantee provided by the Constitution.  It is laughable that one of our two largest political parties has been doing all it can to deny people that it arbitrarily decides are bothersome the right to vote.  In this past election we have witnessed unabashedly naked efforts in North Dakota, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin to legislate voter suppression at the state and local level.  Local election boards create insurmountable obstacles for poor people, black people, native Americans, Latinos, and other minorities in the form of questionable rules and regulations for registration.  Polling places have been moved by these local bureaus to make it harder to vote; hours for registration and voting have been made shorter to prevent people who are working two and three jobs to make it to the polls or the registration office. 

In Georgia, the Secretary of State, who coincidentally was running for Governor had the power to invalidate registrations arbitrarily for ‘signature irregularities’, minor accidental changes in registration information like a missing middle initial or the address designation spelled out as Road not being acceptable because it needed to be Rd. instead.  Over the past 3 years he has invalidated over 600,000 voter registrations!  Insanity!

In North Dakota, the Republican State legislature purposely passed a law requiring citizens to have a street address, knowing full well that Native Americans on reservations don’t have street addresses. 

These kinds of actions have been in the Republican play-book for decades.  Along with Republican legislatures’ efforts to gerrymander districts to isolate minority populations and create districts that favor election of their party’s candidates, these kinds of restrictions have over time necessitated the opposition party winning a contest by an average of more than 9% more votes than the Republican candidate just to be even in the race.  That is not fair, and it is not what the definition of a democracy is.

The new House must take a leading role in creating legislation that abolishes those practices.  But more than that, local entities and citizen’s groups must take the lead in stopping this practice.  We have two years until the next national election and the chance to return sanity to our government, and we must try to fix this inequity now and continue to fight this threat to democracy relentlessly. 

The corollary to this pox on our election process is the inadequacy of our voting technology.  I am a citizen of Florida, and what happened in Florida in Broward, Dade and Palm Beach counties is a disgrace.  Florida is a battleground state, and in all the elections since 2000 we have suffered from hanging chads, badly designed ballots, and voting machines that are old and breaking down.  No excuse.  With all the money spent on ridiculousness, we must find the funds and stamina to change our technology to make it fit the 21^st Century.  You can be sure that the Republicans and Donald Trump in 2020 will be screaming ‘election fraud’ if the election is anywhere close.  We must foreclose that option for them over the next 2 years.  That means that we as citizens must push our state legislators to take action to upgrade voting machines and mechanisms, streamline registration and open our polls long enough to eliminate long lines and unnecessary hardship in getting to the polls.  Unless we can have free and fair elections and the opportunity for every citizen’s vote to be counted, we are fooling ourselves into believing we are living in a democracy.

The other area of great concern is our security with regard to our elections being threatened by outside/foreign entities.  The Russian hacking of our elections is intolerable.  We must first get to the bottom of what happened in 2016, which means continued investigation to confirm or refute the charge that Trump’s campaign colluded and conspired with the Russian government.  If Trump was behind it, he needs to be impeached as a traitor; and if he did not collude or conspire with the Russians then the matter needs to be closed.  The Mueller investigation must come to a conclusion, and for goodness sake, make it happen sooner rather than later!

We must also significantly increase or financing of efforts to counter the kind of Russian interference we experienced in the lead-up to the 2016 election, and create and deploy effective counter measures and punishment if they continue to try to influence our electoral process.

These will not be an easy two years.  You can expect the Republicans to oppose any threat to their agenda with responses that are in line with the negativity and abandonment of humanity we have witnessed since Trump was elected.  They will continue to defend the indefensible, and we must simply be steadfast in our effort to reconstruct a civil society based on integrity and the rule of law.

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