When the Constitution of the United States (“Constitution”) was drafted and ratified in 1789, what was presented to the world was a masterpiece of both government and compromise. The drafters were brilliant, and they produced a document for the ages, but like the people who wrote and voted upon it, it was not perfect; hence the ability to amend it when needed. It is said that when it was completed, a woman asked; “Dr. Franklin, what kind of government do we have, a republic or a monarchy?” His answer; “[a] republic, if you can keep it,” was prescient. Ours was the “Great Experiment.” Many people believed that the “People” were unable to govern themselves. The drafters did their best to anticipate future problems, but there were some things they simply couldn’t foresee. They passed the “Bill of Rights” which emphasized free speech and a free press, but could not have foreseen the Internet, Facebook and Twitter. They were patriots, and clearly could not foresee a nation governed by people whose only interest was in taking and keeping power and profiting from their office, not even caring how the “People” fared. In short, while they did their best to protect the fledgling republic, they could not anticipate the Donald Trumps or Mitch McConnell’s of the world. They even built in the Electoral College to, inter alia, protect us from an unfit individual becoming president (yes, I know there were other reasons, but this was one); it clearly failed, but more importantly, the Republican party has rallied around and defended outrageous acts by the president, spewing forth half truths and outright lies to protect an administration who has given up, even the pretense of adhering to the rule of law. We are living in a post-truth era of cult politics and a return to tribalism for reasons that would take volumes to even summarize.
Only a few decades from President Nixon’s own party being willing to condemn him and put country before party, we’ve reached a nadir where Republicans (AKA Trumpers) unconstitutionally obstructed a Supreme Court nominee to wait for one of their own, refuse to allow any Democratic or bipartisan bills to even be voted upon, refuse to condemn in public what they detest in private, and fear the wrath of one man even more than they fear the collapse of the Rule of Law that is the basis of all else in the U.S. When senators McConnell and Graham abandon their principles, their oaths of office and the Constitution to protect a would-be dictator, and more than a third of the American people get their “NEWS” from an acknowledged government propaganda channel; when people are OK with mass killings and attempts to lock up the President’s political opponents (like his best friend, Putin does), and the party of Trump (I can no longer think of them as the Republican party I’ve always known and was once a part of) refuses to even listen to facts that don’t fit with their leader’s[1] narrative; when refusing to obey the law has become the Trumper standard and not even fought back against by his party, then our democratic republic is in the process of mutating into dictatorship and oligarchy like Russia, China, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.
We aren’t dead yet, but we’ve been intubated and are on life support. We can still recover; it will take both time and bitter medicine to do it; but the clock is ticking. Soon, our “Great Experiment” in self-rule will end and relegate us to “2nd World” status as a client state of Russia or China if we don’t swallow our medicine, rid ourselves of the cancer that has metastasized at the highest levels of our government, and once more return to government “of the People, by the People and for the People” that so many have died to protect.
[1] Just FYI, the word “leader” translates to “Fuhrer” in German.
POWER OF ATTORNEY 