The usual suspects

I’d wager that among those who pay attention to the goings-on in Mordor D.C., exactly nobody was surprised at the alleged Republicans who voted “sure… it’s Constitutional to hold trial on an impeachment of a president who’s no longer even in office.” But in case you missed it, here’s the rogues gallery:

• Sen. Susan Collins of Maine
• Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana
• Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska
• Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah
• Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska
• Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania

Spineless, sniveling, craven sellouts, every one. Romney is perhaps the most self-justifying and sanctimonious of the bunch, but it should never be forgotten he asked Trump to support his political comeback in 2018… and then promptly did all he could in the Senate to spit in his face thereafter. As for Murkowski, in this photo she embodies how well the establishment GOP stands up to the Democrats like Dianne Feinstein.

Several State and county GOP entities have voted to “censure” their respective Congresscritter for this vote. I’m sure they’re all crying their eyes out at the ignominy of it all. (That was sarcasm, in case it wasn’t obvious.) Those gestures mean nothing unless the GOP apparatus follows through with not supporting their next re-election campaign. Collins, Cassidy and Sasse just won re-election in 2020, so those three have a full six years to grease palms and have people forget their outrage before their next challenge (see how this works?).

This is where We the People come in. We simply have to have long memories and a willingness to get these swamp creatures out of their comfy perches in Congress. The anger we feel right now over the election fraud and subsequent unconstitutional “impeachment?” While we can’t dwell on it every day between now and the next election, we need to find a way to remind ourselves in 2, 4 and 6 years, that these people have to go.

This has always been necessary. We’ve just forgotten to maintain such vigilance, and that’s why we’re where we are. “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” Evil never sleeps.

Eliminating political careerism

A columnist from Massachusetts points out that Elizabeth Warren’s failed run for the presidency resulted in a loss of representation for the State:

According to ProPublica, Warren has missed 53.5% of her votes during this session of Congress. This makes her the third-most absent member of the Senate. (Remember: We lowly taxpayers pay Warren $175,000 for this job.)

She clearly decided that running for president was a valid excuse to neglect and ignore her Senate duties. Yes, this despite the fact that she pretty much promised Massachusetts voters in 2018 that if they reelected her, she would not run for president. Then, of course, she changed her mind just a few months later and decided to run and skip out on her current office to do so.

This is a slap in the face to the people of Massachusetts, who elected her to a six-year term just in 2018, undoubtedly with her promise to actually serve this term in mind. Turns out, serving in the Senate was just a backup option for Warren in case her presidential aspirations didn’t work out.

In other words, it’s all about serving her interests, not those of her constituents, whom she failed to represent in Washington more than half the time.  This is a bipartisan problem, and I’ve written about it before.  Elected officials should never take their current office as a given, even while reaching for more influence. 

Aside from term limits, the best way to end political careerism is to require people to serve out the full elective term of office (barring debilitating illness, injury or misconduct), and to ban the practice of running for more than one office at once (i.e. president and senate).  It’s bad enough how much running for reelection shapes an officeholder’s term.  Trying to grab the next rung of the ladder while keeping one hand on the current one “just in case” is the opposite of public-mindedness.  Too many special elections (which cost taxpayer $$) occur because John Q. Politician was elected to two different offices simultaneously, or else was picked as a political appointee while serving in an elected office.  In a country of nearly 330 million people, nobody is that indispensable.  If someone believes they are called to greater responsibility, they should demonstrate a commitment to it by fulfilling any current public obligations, then focusing on convincing the public or an executive to give them such an opportunity.  Such an expectation by the people would mean candidates would be out of political work from time to time.  And that’s not a bad thing, considering that also happens from time to time to the citizens they allegedly represent.  Let our would-be representatives live like the rest of us occasionally.

They will stop at nothing

NBC floats the idea of declaring any reelection of Trump invalid on grounds those who support him are ‘racists:’

If the Trump era has taught us anything, it’s that large numbers of white people in the United States are motivated are motivated at least in part by racism in the voting booth…

Rather than excuse racist voters or try to figure out how to live with their choices, [Terry Smith, a visiting professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law] argues that racist voting is not just immoral, but illegal. The government, Smith says, has the ability, and the responsibility, to address it.

Naturally, two of the proposed remedies are old standbys: eliminate ID requirements to vote, making vote fraud easier, and turn the Senate into another House of Representatives:

Because the majority of white voters in the South vote Republican, and because they outnumber black voters, there isn’t a single Democratic senator from the Deep South other than Doug Jones in Alabama, who may well lose his seat in 2020. Smith argues that we could remedy these disparate, racially motivated outcomes by creating Senate districts. Presumably, that would make it at least possible for black voters to elect a senator who would support their interests.

Translation: we’re not getting the outcomes we want, so let’s make it easier to commit vote fraud, and change the constitutional form of Congress so things might go our way.  I’ve said it before: the Left will delegitimize any institution they cannot control.  More importantly: who gets to determine if voters are casting “racist votes?”  Had Obama lost in either 2008 or 2012, would the learned Terry Smith say that outcome alone was proof of racist motivation (policy differences be damned), and invalidate the election?

This line of thought is very much in the mold of leftist revolutionaries who seek to have the public vote until they get it “right” — after which usually no more voting is allowed.  Ever. Make no mistake: the Left will not accept a Trump reelection, by any margin, however large.  Plan accordingly – November is not far away.

Burning down the House

Donald Trump is now the third president of the U.S. to be formally impeached by the House of Representatives.  Today the House, under Speaker Pelosi, is saying they will “delay” sending that Constitutional indictment over to the Senate until they are assured of a “fair trial.”  In other words the House has, by implication, already convicted the Senate of being governed totally by partisanship — a case of projection if there ever was one.

Under the Democrats, the House has been out of control for all of 2019.  Their crusade to fling poo at the president until something kind-of-sort-of might seem to stick is a perfect example of why our Founders created a republic, not a democracy.  Remember that generation later watched the French Revolution unfold.  They saw first hand the deadly dangers of passionate, unrestrained mob rule — which is exactly what this whole impeachment charade has been, complete with armed Antifa thugs in the streets at times.  Not content to merely be in the opposition until the next election, the House Democrats have taken it upon themselves to delegitimize both the Executive Branch and the other chamber of Congress.

Given these circumstances, it’s important to set a benchmark and declare this abuse of one of the Constitution’s most somber provisions as invalid.

Enter the Supreme Court.

The country must decide whether, henceforth, impeachment will be a routine clash between a House of Representatives and White House of different parties over policy differences or acute personal abrasions, as this is, or whether the authors of the Constitution meant, and the national interest requires, that it be reserved for accusations of high crimes on the same plane of misconduct as treason or bribe-taking…

Rejection by the majority in the Senate is not an adequate debunking of this abuse by the Democratic leadership of the House of Representatives of their offices. The country is at a turning point: routinize presidential impeachment or keep it as a last resort in extreme cases of wrongdoing. When the executive and the bare majority of one half of the legislative branch are so severely and antagonistically divided, the traditional tie-breaker is the judicial branch, and it should be consulted.

(emphasis added)

I agree.  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell should immediately request a Supreme Court ruling on the Constitutional validity of the House’s actions.  Such an examination would have to compare the way the Democrats rammed this through with the precedents of previous impeachment proceedings.  I believe such a public comparison would lay bare the manner in which the Democrats abused their majority to deny Trump and the Republicans any effective opportunity to defend the administration by presenting an opposing view of the issues in question.  As the House Republican Whip Steve Scalise noted during the pre-impeachment vote discussion, the GOP is still waiting for transcripts of interviews in which they were not allowed, or the ability to call their own witnesses.

The American people have a highly developed sense of fairness, and perhaps an unhealthy obsession with achieving it.  That usually gives an advantage to liberals when they propose heavy-handed government intervention in the name of “compassion.”  In this case, however, I believe many Americans have been turned off by what has clearly been an unfair process that demanded Trump prove himself innocent rather than place the burden of proof on the accusers.  That’s just one of many reasons thousands of people waited in freezing weather for hours to hear the president speak, even as the House marched toward impeachment.

There’s just one problem with taking this pseudo-impeachment to the Supreme Court for validation.  In the event they rule the charade for what it is and dismiss it, the Democrats will immediately claim the result is due to Trump having selected 2 of the justices, creating a slim ‘conservative’ (and I use that term loosely) majority.  They will press this hard, and in so doing, seek to damage the legitimacy the remaining third branch of the Federal Government — one whose rulings they used to consider holy writ, when it served their cause.  It really has come to this: if the liberals can’t run the machinery, they’ll sabotage it.  Having burned down the House, they’ll burn the rest of the structure, too.

But only if we let them.  The most significant result of Trump’s election in 2016 may be that the other side has dropped all masks and pretense.  Their agenda and attitudes are clear for all to see.  Come November 2020, the Democratic Party must be destroyed, not just defeated.  They need to suffer electoral loss so great that no political organization will again dare do what they’ve tried.  And we need to be ready for the inevitable temper tantrum that will result in such a case.  As they’re doing in Virginia and other States, keep your powder dry.

The value of the vote

Caution: this is a long post; that’s why it has a “jump break” on the front page of the blog.

It’s ironic that Bernie Sanders brought this up while I’ve been re-reading Heinlein’s Starship Troopers:

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said he thinks every U.S. citizen, even the convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, should be allowed to vote in American elections.  Sanders offered his stance at a CNN town hall Monday when asked whether he thought felons should be allowed to vote while they’re incarcerated, not just after their release.

He was pressed on whether it was appropriate to enfranchise sex offenders or someone convicted of a heinous crime like Tsarnaev, who with his brother carried out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing that left three dead and injured hundreds more.

“Yes, even for terrible people, because once you start chipping away and you say, ‘Well, that guy committed a terrible crime, not going to let him vote. Well, that person did that. Not going to let that person vote,’ you’re running down a slippery slope,” Sanders said in response to a question about restoring felons’ voting rights.

It appears Sanders is saying everyone should have the privilege of voting, regardless what they’ve done in their lives.  That’s not merely wrong, it’s disastrously dangerous.  Unlike the (poorly done) movie of Starship Troopers, the book discusses in great detail the importance of the franchise.  Indeed, the book is highly controversial for presenting a futuristic society in which the only full citizens with voting privileges are military veterans.  Pardon the excerpt from one of the book’s classroom discussions:

Legislating political careerism

I think most Americans would agree our political class is very disconnected from the world the rest of us live in.  A law recently passed in New Jersey illustrates one of the main reasons why:

Gov. Phil Murphy (D) signed a bill on Thursday that would allow Sen. Cory BookerCory Anthony BookerAge becomes talking point surrounding 2020 Democratic fieldCNN’s Don Lemon reveals political affiliationNew NJ law would let Cory Booker run for president, Senate at same timeMORE (D), who has been widely seen as a possible 2020 presidential contender, to run for president and the Senate simultaneously.

How nice that “Spartacus” can now run for President now without risking losing his Senate seat.  I’ve said before that no candidate should ever be allowed to run for two offices simultaneously.  This often results in a special election, which is essentially a cost to the taxpayer to provide job security for politicians.  Our “representatives” stay too long in government as it is.  Why would we want to subsidize secure consolidation prizes for them?  Such careerism is the leading cause of the disconnect between “representatives” and the represented.  Mordor D.C. is an entirely different world from the rest of the country.  Those who “serve” there should be required to get out more (literally).

I’ve addressed this practice of “dual office-seeking” before:

I’ve said before we have to stop enabling careerism in politics.  No politician should be able to simultaneously run for higher office and reelection to his current seat (thus forcing the taxpayer expense of a special election if “promoted.”)  Politicians should not be able to shop around for a favorable district just by maintaining a second (or third…) home there. I’d even be in favor of allowing States to mandate their senators be drawn only from native-born residents (to prevent people like Her Hillariness from suddenly moving to a State just to become a Senator). 

Some time back I posted a long list of things I’d do if I could tweak our political system.  Since it’s election time, I invite my readers to review them again.  None will be on the ballot this time.  That doesn’t mean they couldn’t be in the future.

Be sure to vote tomorrow.  Early voting turnout suggests the country realizes what an unusually important midterm election this is.  Whatever you think about Trump personally, two things should be clear: first, his results to this point are far better than what many feared two years ago.  Second, the Democrats under their current “leadership,” governing philosophy and ongoing blind rage over their legitimate defeat two years ago must not be allowed to regain any of the levers of power.  Period.

Civil war underway?

This is today’s must-read speech.  It puts into words something I’ve been feeling since the election results in 2016.  The losers of that election have gone far beyond sour grapes.  It feels as if there is a jockeying for position toward a final confrontation.  Given the Left’s utter denial of the 2016 results, there is every possibility that if the housecleaning I’m hoping for gets underway, the struggle could go from backrooms to bullets.

This is not something I write lightly.  Read the entire piece for yourself, because it’s important to understand the nature of the current struggle.  Lengthy excerpt:

Guns are how a civil war ends. Politics is how it begins.

How do civil wars happen?

Two or more sides disagree on who runs the country. And they can’t settle the question through elections because they don’t even agree that elections are how you decide who’s in charge.

That’s the basic issue here. Who decides who runs the country? When you hate each other but accept the election results, you have a country. When you stop accepting election results, you have a countdown to a civil war…

The first time a Republican president was elected this century, they said he didn’t really win. The Supreme Court gave him the election. There’s a pattern here.

Trump didn’t really win the election. Bush didn’t really win the election. Every time a Republican president won an election this century, the Democrats insist he didn’t really win…

It means they don’t believe that transfers of power in this country are determined by elections.

That’s a civil war.

There’s no shooting. At least not unless you count the attempt to kill a bunch of Republicans at a charity baseball game practice. But the Democrats have rejected our system of government.

This isn’t dissent. It’s not disagreement.

You can hate the other party. You can think they’re the worst thing that ever happened to the country. But then you work harder to win the next election. When you consistently reject the results of elections that you don’t win, what you want is a dictatorship.

Your very own dictatorship…

Professional government is a guild. Like medieval guilds. You can’t serve if you’re not a member. If you haven’t been indoctrinated into its arcane rituals. If you aren’t in the club.

And Trump isn’t in the club. He brought in a bunch of people who aren’t in the club with him.

Now we’re seeing what the pros do when amateurs try to walk in on them. They spy on them, they investigate them and they send them to jail. They use the tools of power to bring them down.

That’s not a free country.

We’re in a civil war between conservative volunteer government and leftist professional government.

The pros have made it clear that they’re not going to accept election results anymore. They’re just going to make us do whatever they want. They’re in charge and we better do what they say.

That’s the war we’re in. And it’s important that we understand that.

Because this isn’t a shooting war yet. And I don’t want to see it become one.

Again, read the entire piece here (video of speech at the link).

Treasures should be guarded

I’ve noted before that we have greatly cheapened the value of U.S. citizenship.  If anyone from anywhere can sneak into our country with a reasonable expectation that if they “hide in the shadows” long enough for another amnesty, then our birthright citizenship means nothing — or nada, if you must.  That should be completely unacceptable to any citizen already here.

One particular aspect of that citizenship that is clearly neglected is our voting process.  There should be absolutely no opposition to requiring photo I.D. to cast a vote — but the soft bigotry of low expectations (plus a desire for a fraud-conducive system) in the Democratic Party keeps claiming there’s no need, and that it’s an undue burden on minorities.

That’s a load of Donkey manure.  One already needs a photo ID to do all sorts of everyday things.  But the Left says there’s no indication enough fraud exists to require such documentation.

Well, how about this:

Voting machines in more than one-third of all Detroit precincts registered more votes than they should have during last month’s presidential election, according to Wayne County records prepared at the request of The Detroit News…

“There’s always going to be small problems to some degree, but we didn’t expect the degree of problem we saw in Detroit. This isn’t normal,” said Krista Haroutunian, chairwoman of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers…  (emphasis added)

Republican state senators last week called for an investigation in Wayne County, including one precinct where a Detroit ballot box contained only 50 of the 306 ballots listed in a poll book, according to an observer for Trump.

Detroit has not had a Republican mayor since 1962.  It’s safe to say there’s a well-oiled Democratic political machine in that city now, and that the Democrats have run everything as Detroit went from being a high-flying manufacturing center to a broken shell of its former self.  As for the comment above “this isn’t normal,” I’d say it applies more to getting caught than to having such irregularities.  What’s amusing is that this came to light because Jill Stein and her Green Party demanded a recount that spent a boatload of money in Michigan and Wisconsin only to find Trump had 131 more votes in Wisconsin than originally recorded on election day.

Everything today revolves around convenience, which is why the arguments against voter I.D. have traction.  Simply put, a lot of people don’t care if a lot of their neighbors are too lazy to take the few required steps to participate in what should be a secure voting process.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: in order to vote, you should have to pass a basic civics exam on how the Constitution sets up our government, you should have to have photo I.D. to vote, and your finger should be dipped in a Red, White or Blue ink (your choice) that doesn’t wash/rub out for a couple days. (I also believe that if you’re on public assistance, your voting rights should be temporarily suspended.  Make sure you can take care of yourself before you start impacting others.)

I was in Iraq when they held their first post-Saddam election.  From what I saw, they took their process and its security much more seriously than we do.  That should shame us into action.  Iraqis went to polling stations even with the threat of terrorist activity across the country (something that, thankfully, we only know a little about… for now).  And we can’t be bothered to get an I.D.?  Give me a break.

Clean up the voter rolls, pass the photo I.D. requirement nationally, and start making people demonstrate knowledge of the system and its history before letting them participate in it.  Compared to how many have died or been wounded over the decades to give us the space and freedom to even hold elections, is that really too much to ask?  Some things worth having are not convenient to maintain…

“What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.”

— Thomas Paine, from “The American Crisis,” written when protecting freedom (during the American Revolution) was a lot more inconvenient than it is today.

The rigged game

*Update:  While my original post focused on how a mandarin class in our society has rigged the electoral game, this post focuses on how the concept of representative democracy itself has some inherent flaws and weaknesses.  None can deny that the electorate is complicit in the development of the current mess.  After all, pitchfork parades and tar and feathers are still options.  And far too many voters think they’re “sending a message” by voting for candidate X, when in fact they don’t know candidate X’s actual record or stated positions.  In other words, they’re voting by emotion, not fact and reason:

…as noted above, many people vote as an expressive act. The typical Obama voter knew nothing of his policies, but wanted to be “part” of “something”. There are all sorts of cultural and emotional connotations associated with Team Pepsi, and people want to affiliate themselves with those signals. Team Coke is no better: many Republican voters are in favor of a culture of God, Flag, and Apple Pie, and cast a vote for the GOP as an expressive act, without knowing or caring the actual positions of the candidates they vote for.  ((This, too, figures into the Rise of Trump, since many of his supporters see him as a chance to wave a middle finger at the mandarins, but haven’t taken the time to actually parse what he’s said. — Jemison))

ORIGINAL POST:

Read these two articles, then ask yourself: why is it we put so much faith in elections in this country?

After the final vote count in Nevada, Hillary Clinton has 52 pledged delegates and Bernie Sanders 51 — delegates required to vote for them at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. All were acquired in state primaries and caucuses as a result of a vote of the people.

So Clinton and Sanders are virtually tied, right?

Wrong. Clinton is leagues ahead of Sanders in the overall delegate count, 503-70. This is because of “superdelegate” rules that allow 712 Democratic Party insiders to decide on their own whom to support at the convention.

The Democratic Party’s superdelegate rules, devised after George McGovern’s 1972 defeat, are not particularly democratic, reflecting an era when party officials were reluctant to lose control of the presidential nominating process.

The Republicans are little better:

That rule was fortified by amendments made at the Republican convention of 2012, ironically to handicap insurgent candidates in the future. It was a response to the phenomenon of Texas Rep. Ron Paul winning nearly all of the delegates in states like Maine, Minnesota and Nevada, in spite of losing wider initial contests in those states.

What point is there to elections if Elephant and Donkey insiders always get to pick the candidates?  We’re stirred up to resent the influence of “big money” in elections, but Big Political Party shenanigans constrain our ‘choices’ as much or more than does donor activity.  Is it any wonder our government’s policies are so out of line with what the people want?  The bi-factional ruling class makes sure the only “choices” the public perceives are slight variations around a tightly controlled mean.  That way they continue to do what they want, public wishes be damned.  The best explanation for Trump’s meteoric rise is that so many people think he represents a means to say “up yours” to the insiders rigging this game.  (He doesn’t; he merely represents another facet of that rigged game — the face that’s shown when the electorate needs to blow off a particularly large head of steam, as it does this year.  The real function elections seems to serve in our country is pacifying the electorate with the illusion they have some input into what Washington does.

As I’ve said in previous posts, I have no idea where this is going, but I’m pretty sure we won’t like the destination.  Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul were “insurgent candidates,” to use the term in the article above.  Agree with them or not, they had a developed view of how they would approach governance.  Perot self-destructed, but the other two were deliberately (and in the case of Ron Paul, frantically) marginalized by the party apparatus — and the electorate let them do it.

So, having passed those off ramps, the course our nation is on has led to The Donald and his yuuuuuge ego, Bernie Sanders and the usual “hey kid, want some free stuff?” come on of socialism, and Her Hillariness, who promises to do for Washington what she did for information security at the State Department.  At this point I’m tempted to just write in “George Washington” this November.  I don’t think it would make my vote count any less.

Wake me when it’s time to rebuild from the ashes.