The most fundamental right of any democracy is the right to vote. This week the Supreme Court failed to uphold that right when their politically motivated decision failed to rein in the anti-voting legislation that is sweeping across the country. Not only was the Court’s decision politically motivated, it was also unpopular with the majority of the nation’s citizens by over a 2 to 1 margin.
Polls show by 62% to 30% that Americans favor legislation that protects the right to vote and makes it easier.
So how did this happen?
Well, when you have 6 Republican appointed judges to 3 Democratic appointed judges those things will always happen.
This is especially true when you have judges like Amy Coney Barrett on the Court. I find it fascinating and absolutely implausible that when Barrett was questioned about her suitability for the Court the fact of her being a lifetime member of People of Praise, a fanatic Charismatic Catholic cult, was never mentioned. The fact that she was raised as a “handmaid,” who was assigned to a mentor and obligated to “affirm the Nicene Creed and agree to the community’s covenant,” just didn’t come up. How could this happen? I’m not even going to bother to get into the fact that this cult has been accused by a number of men and women of ignoring complaints of sexual and physical abuse to them as children, accusations that until now have been routinely ignored and dismissed.
The Clarence Thomas and Matt Kavanaugh Supreme Court appointment hearings gave us a good hard look at the lack of regard afforded sexual assault accusations by the Senators who investigated those appointments.
But this is much more important. This is about a judge who has freely and publically made a pledge to the covenant and how that can and does affect her ability to judge fairly, every case that comes before her on the Court.
Barrett is a charismatic Catholic, a member of a cult that represents the most fanatic of prejudicial Catholic non-thinking. She may be a brilliant lawyer and legal scholar but when it comes to deciding any issue that touches on religion or the influence of religion, her judgement, simply because it is controlled by her cult leaders is no longer valid. She simply cannot be depended on to be able to employ all that legal knowledge in a fair, unprejudiced manner and we can’t be sure that the opinions she espouses are even hers.
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Donald Rumsfeld died this week. I was raised not to speak ill of the dead but Rumsfeld worked so hard to earn what he has coming that it seems a shame to waste all his efforts. He was the ultimate warmonger and along with the ever evil Dick Cheney he led a not particularly bright president into two wars we had no business fighting.
He was Bush’s Secretary of defense and used that job to design and build the Iraq war; in the process of which he became and active proponent of torture. In another time these two proclivities would have made him a defendant at the Nuremberg trials but with a Republican administration, run by a dolt and his evil Iago, he was a respected strategist. His global war on terror claimed over 800,000 lives, displaced over 37 million people and cost the United States taxpayers around $6.4 trillion. The invasion of Iraq, rather than clamping down on terrorism, led to the rise if ISIS, the greatest terrorist organization of its time and one which we are still fighting, almost 20 years later.
Just to prove that everything he did was motivated by his ill conceived war plans and that he regretted nothing, he stated in his 2011 memoir that he had no regrets about starting the Iraq War and that a Saddam Hussein in Baghdad would mean a more perilous Middle East than the one we have today. This, of course is ridiculous. Saddam Hussein was a small time dictator with two nutcase sons, who while monsters within Iraq, managed to keep their insanity within their own borders, whereas today, thanks to Rumsfeld and his war, Iraq is the seventh level of hell, with problems that extend beyond their own world to enlarging circles of terror.
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The Moscow Mitch McConnell led GOP managed to foil the Democrats attempt to pass a federal voting act this week, claiming a strategy that went all the way back to the ‘60s and those famous Dixiecrats; southern Democrats who thought they were still fighting the Civil War. It was a state’s rights issue then and it seems it’s still a states rights issue, at least if you believe McConnell and that’s the rub. Nobody in their right mind would ever believe Mitch about anything. Still, he is determined to have us believe that we’re still fighting that medieval battle.
Don’t get me wrong; there are aspects of State’s Rights still present in today’s battles. This mighty nation was founded as a federation of states but for those of us still able to consider problems logically there is the sure knowledge that this is now the most powerful nation on the planet and that the sweet picture of a cuddly little federation of quaint hamlets is no longer reality.
Being in the process of abandoning a monarchy, the founding fathers were very cautious about ceding power to any central seat. That worry still exists, as was just seen in the Fat Liar from Mar-a-Largo’s attempt to set up a dictatorship or his current campaign with McConnell to subvert the voting system by allowing states that favor him to set up their own rules on who can and can’t vote and how they can go about it.
In our blatantly misguided attempts to protect small state voters we have encouraged adjuncts to our electoral process that are all but completely non-functional and that fly directly in the face of the basic democratic premise of; “One man, one vote.”
To that end, the current Republican Party, recognizing that in a fair one man, one vote world they will have their hats handed to them, has discarded integrity and taken up the cudgel for non-democratic entities like the Electoral College and 2 Senators per state, regardless of population. Both of these illogical structures have led to gerrymandering and any number of non-democratic situations that are made even more unacceptable by a variety of bizarre state election rules currently being considered in Red states, all of which would be quashed by national election standards if we could pass them.
What this country needs is a set of national voting guidelines that can be interpreted and adjusted to local needs but will remain under federal jurisdiction.
It doesn’t look like that will happen until we get rid of Moscow Mitch.
McConnell long ago decided that he wanted no truck with anything but victory. He cares nothing for democracy, freedom, justice, honor, the law or any of those other, for him, abstract concepts that get in the way of his maintaining his power. He has ignored or changed at will, Senate rules to pass tax breaks for the rich and tax exemptions for giant corporations. He has done the same to stop the appointment of liberal Supreme Court judges and encourage the appointment of lower court fascist judges. McConnell is as clever as he is devious and as functional as he is evil. There is no trusting him, no negotiating with him. He is a force of nature that recognizes only capitulation. He is a clear and present danger to our democracy that must be removed as soon as legally possible by whatever means necessary.