307 mass shootings in the last 311 days.
Forget Afghanistan, the war is here. Anyone who doesn’t recognize this belongs on the board of the NRA. I grew up a hunter and for almost twenty years in mid-life held a Federal Firearms License. I no longer deal in guns and I long ago gave up hunting. While I no longer hunt, I don’t hold hunting against others, unless they are hunting someone’s kids. But hunting isn’t done with an AR-15 or any other automatic weapon unless you are an incompetent clown like Dick Cheney who just likes to kill and destroy. If you can’t kill an animal with one bullet you should go back to video games and stop endangering those who are hunting around you.
70% of the American public wants to strengthen our gun control laws. That’s as big a majority on any question before the American public now or in the past few decades. It’s time those in congress who are still protecting the NRA give up their lobbyist-supplied perks and listen to the voters who put them in office. Let’s hope the recent election, in which previously solid red states like Texas, Georgia and Arizona produced tantalizingly close races, will send a message to the GOP congressmen who have been protecting the NRA’s position. Maybe some of them will be smart enough to understand the sword hanging over their necks. Those who don’t will be gone in 2020.
*****
The Democrats have taken the House, a big number of governorships and a huge number of local legislator spots. Okay, so they got the tools, now they have to make them work. How do they do that? Not by going after Trump to the exclusion of all the necessary programs that are screaming for solutions. If they do that, they will not be any better then the GOP members they are replacing.
The Democrats must create legislation that addresses the obvious problems that Americans all across the country are dealing with: healthcare, infrastructure, education, privacy, poverty, immigration and voting rights. They must do this or face the wrath of an already disgusted public, just when they need the support of that public to throw Trump out in 2020.
Trying to impeach Trump is a complete waste of time. If they do, a GOP controlled Senate will do what it has done for the past two years and simply vote against conviction. This will do two things. It will leave a floundering Trump in a state of manic rage, keeping him from acting rationally in any subsequent situation. It will also allow the GOP to correctly point out that the Dems are no better than the GOP at getting shit done.
The Democrats job is not to worry about how to get even with Trump. The Democrats job is to pass much needed legislation with both the Senate and Trump on the other side. The first thing they must do is to find a subject that most people agree needs action, even if it’s just in part. The obvious one, mainly because no one has yet spoken out against it, is infrastructure. The Democrats have come out for it. Trump has spoken of the necessity for it. The GOP hasn’t spoken against it. The only drawback is where to find the money to pay for it. That doesn’t seem to be a problem in a world where debt is ignored and tax cuts are readily available to the rich despite exploding deficits. Traditionally the Republicans want to put infrastructure projects into the hands of private industry, while the Democrats want the government to finance it. On the other hand the Republicans traditionally didn’t want to add even one dollar to the national debt but that concept seems to have gone by the boards and the sky’s the limit on spending and reducing the taxes that used to pay for national improvements. Trump doesn’t seem to recognize any limits in spending when it’s done in conjunction with something he and his rich friends approve of, so maybe there’s some hope for getting these three deadly enemies, the House, the Senate and Trump together to hack out some kind of bill that will provide some relief to our rotting infrastructure and can still get signed into law.
Once there is some success in acting on some kind of bi-partisan bill the next thing that has to be attacked is healthcare, mainly because it is the one problem that touches almost every citizen in the nation. This is something that can actually get done and in the process we can have much better and much cheaper healthcare, a situation that will benefit more Americans than any other piece of legislation that anyone can produce. An approach that could work is to change the name Obamacare to Single Payer or anything else and present it to Trump as his idea. Actually Tuumpcare would be a better name, given the needs of the situation. It should be just an extension of Medicare, covering every American for everything that is wrong with them medically and paid for through the government. Sound expensive? It’s not. Not when you consider the savings gained by eliminating the cost of insurance premiums and the reduction in drug costs gained by being able to negotiate the outrageous profits now being generated by drug company overcharges.
No question that the insurance and drug industries would fight this to the death as they already have, but the key to making this work is Trump! It’s an out bet that Trump knows nothing about healthcare legislation other then its nickname is Obamacare. Change that and he will be happy as a pig in shit. Name it after him and he would be happy to stab every industry that stands in its way in the back, regardless of how much they have supported him. Give him a win and he will throw all five kids into the hopper and have them ground up for lunchmeat.
None of this will be as easy as it looks here. It will entail a real war and months of negotiating with much more complicated intrigue than has been laid out here, but it can be accomplished. It appears that despite GOP Senators like Flack and Corker quitting the fight, there are others who might do the right thing under the proper circumstances, along with the needed pressure. The reward is that if the Democrats can get functional bills passed on infrastructure and healthcare, they will be in a position to garner GOP support for bills on education, immigration and even the environment. Of course anything on the environment will bring a great deal of opposition, both from the fossil fuel industry and from Trump himself.
I don’t believe anything can be done about the Electoral College or gerrymandering without both Houses of congress being in Democratic control. If or when that occurs it will be important that the Democrats don’t turn into Republicans and try to screw the other side. They will have to seek a fair redrawing of all the districts in the nation, probably along clearly established and long-standing county lines.
Of course very little of this will be able to be accomplished without the cooperation of Trump. A veto proof majority is just not available in the Senate no matter who flips. So the key becomes Bob Mueller and his investigation. Trump is a criminal and he always has been . He understands criminal deals. The reason he has been acting like a maniac since the mid terms is because he sees his ability to avoid criminal prosecution fading as his ability to dump Mueller slips away. Whittaker, his hack appointment, is already ass deep in ethics committee members demanding that he recuse himself from anything having to do with Mueller and he hasn’t even figured out which chair in his office is his. If Whittaker recuses himself, Trump will be right back where he was with Sessions, except he will look like more of a fool than usual for firing his cartoon AG. Protecting or at least delaying Trump from prosecution by Mueller in exchange for his cooperation on certain bills the Dems want to pass is the carrot that will appeal to Trump’s giant ego and his terror about prosecuton. All you have to do is look at his behavior since the mid terms to know he will jump at it. The problem for the Democrats is finding someone with the stones to present it to the fat liar. Lyndon Johnson would have jammed the deal through in a heartbeat but unfortunately he is long dead. I really don’t see anyone in the Democratic Party right now with Johnson’s understanding of power and how to manipulate it. He would have been the perfect foil for Trump. It’s a game our criminal President fully understands and with which he would be confortable; one which his egomaniacal personality would fully embrace. No, it’s not the image the Democrats want to sell but it would work a hell of a lot better than anything they have in their pockets now and it would enable them to provide legislation that the nation sorely needs and can’t even be hinted at under the present breakdown until after the 2020 election. No it’s not the ideal approach to government but the Republican’s and Trump have so bent our government and our national perspective that at this point they are teetering on the edge of collapse. Fixing them will be a monumental undertaking. This is not the ideal way to set out on a pathway to moral regeneration but we may already be past that possibility if we don’t, in the next two years, actually achieve something for the country. If you want to make an omelet you have to break a couple of eggs.
*****
Now that the democrats have murdered the House Republicans, the next order of business is what is their plan for policy and who will lead them. There has been a great deal of noise made about replacing Nancy Pelosi as the leader f the Party in the House. I have written about Pelosi in the past, often negatively, but there can be no doubt that it was Pelosi who led the blue wave that inundated the GOP and put many new Democrats in office. All the Republicans ran against her and most of them lost. Pelosi has been around a long time, which seems to be the main objection of many of the Democrats who want a new Speaker with new blood. Maybe, considering the GOP example, we shouldn’t be so hasty to bring in new and by definition inexperienced blood to the leadership. We are living through he greatest example of failure to run a country in this century. When you have no background or experience you tend to act like Donald Trump. Granted, Trump brings a whole other boxcar full of psychotic problems but maybe it would be a good idea for the Democrats to take advantage of Pelosi’s abilities to organize, raise money and be able to negotiate the inner machinations of that political body. It would serve her well to appoint a second in command who is much younger and who can be trained in the necessary disciplines of the office. I think we need Pelosi’s experience and abilities. I think we need her strength to hold off the “impeach Trump” forces and push the party to create much needed legislation in any number of areas. Let’s not do what the Democrats usually do and explode into a dozen little sects. Let’s try and hold it together and really get something done. It would be such a relief at long last.