June 2021 Archives

Dear America,

The things that Mitch McConnell goes un-reproached for are mind-boggling.  Politics is full of sophistry, but almost always it is marginally plausible at the very least.  The Republicans claim that the election in 2020 was rigged, and they adduce incidents that are at least colorable as supportive of the claim, for example, a suitcase full of ballots being video-taped as it is pulled out from under a table where votes were being counted.  Of course there was an explanation that had nothing to do with fraud; the on-site supervisor had told the counters that the center was closing, at which time they packed the ballots away--ironically for security purposes--only to be ordered to reopen the case and resume counting in consequence of orders from above.   The Republicans ignored the facts under cover of ignorance so they could feign sincerity, but McConnell doesn't even bother to try to cover his lack of integrity with claims wishfully thought.  This week, for example, he marshaled his Republican Party's Trump-struck soldiers to vote unanimously against a voting rights bill aimed at preventing the circumscription of voting rights being curtailed in several Republican dominated states by state voting rights bills that don't guaranty the opportunity to vote, but rather restrict it.  And what was McConnell's public justification for his enforcement of this party blind loyalty?  Did he have any evidence that restrictions on the opportunity to vote would accomplish anything laudable?  No.

What he said after pronouncing the party's univocal stand firmly against the federal voting rights guaranty embodied by the bill in question is that it comprised Democratic Party efforts to enhance their vote tallies nationwide rather than its obvious implicit gravamen: that it is necessary to prevent the Republican state legislators and governors from limiting the right to vote in their favor.  Think about the logic, or the bald-faced farcicality in McConnell's claim.  The Democratic bill would guaranty voters a certain number of days for early voting.  It would prevent them from being barred from voting because they didn't register soon enough.  It would permit state election officials to send them absentee ballots, all among other things intended to make the polls accessible to more voters, which implicitly renders McConnell's preposterous contrived justification for his political chicanery plainly spurious.  If the Republicans don't want more votes cast, it must be because they feel that more votes means more Democratic votes, or more simply, more voters favor Democratic candidates than they do Republicans.  In a true democracy, that should translate into political hegemony for the Democrats, which is what we have now...barely.  The conclusion that the Republicans, McConnell in particular, want to rise to power by preventing votes from being cast for the opposition Democratic Party's candidates to the extent that they were so cast in 2020 is inescapable.  Yet, McConnell has pressed it shamelessly, and no one has called him on it, at least not is such a way as to make the news, all while two Democratic senators refuse to support the bill...and thus pass it...because since all the Republicans voted against it, it isn't bipartisan.  As if bipartisanship is possible when the Republicans press their own contrived versions of the facts to justify their blind party loyalty.

While this is all just a little more unsavory manipulation of our system under the regime of Capo McConnell to go along with the Supreme Court nomination stifled by him with an argument that he ignored when his party wanted to put its candidate on the court at the last minute, as well as the votes he prevented so as to protect his partisans from being forced to vote out of party loyalty as opposed to loyalty to their constituents, his duplicity is beginning to have deleterious effects on our nation that will live far into the future.  Ironically, it seems that the Justice that he single-handedly manipulated onto the Supreme Court may in fact be more rational fair-minded than conservative and Republican, but that one small saving grace won't get McConnell into heaven.

If for no other reason than to mitigate the threat to our way of life that Mitch McConnell's Tammany Hall style of running his party constitutes, we all have to vote in 2022.  If of the 34 senate elections that will occur at that time the Democrats win just one of the 19 Republican seats on the ballot and keep all of the 15 Democratic seats that are in play, McConnell's reign of terror will be over.  He will still be the Republicans' Darth Vader, but the force won't be with him.  My fingers are already crossed.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Mitch McConnell has rendered "bipartisanship" a dirty word...an obvious fantasy.  With his open and public statement that "one hundred percent of my [McConnell's] focus is on stopping this new administration," McConnell demonstrated that bipartisanship is just a euphemism for despotism as opposed to democracy.  Putting his comment into context, McConnell was talking about President Biden's current initiative and the policy it represents toward not just renewing our aging and failing infrastructure but toward facilitating the creation of new, well-paid jobs and the social programs that would free people to work and prosper in them.  It was such a blatant admission of his intention to not just oppose, but to obstruct efforts of the opposition just because they are the efforts of the opposition, and not those of his party, as to demonstrate that he is unconcerned about being labeled with an at-any-cost anti-democrat--not just anti-Democrat--reputation.  Between McConnell and Joe Manchin, a DINO (Democrat in name only), the other senator from Kentucky, that state has by itself advanced the death of democracy more than all the other states combined.  By putting the power in the Senate into the hands of these two dogmatic politicos, for whom the practice of legislating is no more than a matter of rigidly implementing a set of arcane political rules to the effect of insuring that no legislation inspired by the will of the majority of the American people gets enacted unless they allow it, they have turned the democratic legislative process on its head.  They don't seem to understand, or maybe they just don't care, that democracy means government by the people, not by a select class of powerful political insiders who designate themselves a ruling oligarchy.

To be fair, McConnell went on to qualify his remark as a statement of the principle that he opposes the conversion of our society to socialism, which is what he claims the Biden plans are.  And in his defense, when you mention opposition to socialism, you are uttering a shibboleth that identifies a fairly large contingent within the American polity, so McConnell is effectively representing a segment of the nation's population.  But it isn't the majority.  Most Americans, according to current polls, approve of Biden's proposals for resurrecting our now uncompetitive infrastructure and socio-economic distribution of opportunity and resources.  So McConnell's commitment to thwarting the adjustments to our current societal architecture accords with the will of some of the people, but not the majority's...by far.  But the remaining question is, how united will the real majority be come 2022 in demonstrating how odious the rigid, conservative Republican obduracy toward the plight of so many of us is when we go to the polls, and that is the plight the nation as a whole has faced for decades.  Republicans do not require righteousness from their leaders as they don't require it of themselves because they are aware that they sit in the minority of our society, thus ceding the power of a democratic government to the liberal opposition in virtual perpetuity...or at least until conservative Republicans see the light of what they declare to be their ethos every week at church, synagogue or mosque.

So, here we are with an open and, in my opinion egregiously partisan, admission that the Republican Party, or at least it's leadership, opposes what the majority of Americans want, and thus will deny it to them by punctilious and anti-democratic adherence to rules that the American people not only didn't devise, but probably for the most part don't even know exist.  As I've said often, the origins of the notion that the electoral college and the Senate were intended to protect the nation from the will of the people, and that doing so by empowering what Spiro Agnew called "an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as [our salvation]" is as old as the Federalist Papers or older.  Unfortunately, what is needed to repudiate that notion as a nation is a vastly shared epiphany.  We must somehow make those who accept as legitimate the conservative Republican determination to dominate even though they are the minority understand that doing so is a disservice to the American working man and woman, and thus a disservice to themselves.

It's going to be an uphill struggle, and it may take a generation or more.  That kind of change must be gradual if it is to prevail.  It must gradually permeate this society the way that egalitarianism did.  I just hope it doesn't require the same kind of upheaval that the end of slavery and Jim Crow necessitated.

Your friend,

Mike