Donald J. Trump won. He beat Kamala Harris by 1.5 million votes. It’s not a mandate, but a pretty thorough beating. Mr. Trump swept the swing states and outnumbered Harris in the Electoral College. The Republicans won the trifecta of the presidency and both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
More than half the voters feel exonerated. On election night when Pennsylvania was called for Mr. Trump there were fireworks around my neighborhood. My part of the electorate, the not-quite half, turned out the lights, drew the curtains and pulled the covers over our collective heads.
Now it is time to begin again; the time for grief and mourning has passed. We start anew to defend democracy and the Constitution.
But we are not starting from scratch. We have the words and actions of Donald J. Trump, along with his various investigations, indictments, convictions and judgements. So, we know what we are up against. The adage of “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me,” comes to mind.
President-elect Trump is messing with the separateness of the branches of government in an attempt to unify more power into the presidency before he even gets into office. Even now, he calls on the Republican Senators to delay consent to any of the judges for more than 40 openings on various federal courts, though he is not yet president.
There are many ways that the president-elect wants to consolidate power to the executive branch. He has started to dismantle a fully functioning Constitutional democracy. For instance, he has not signed the usual paperwork that, among other things, declares that the incoming president will abide by any ethics laws. Mr. Trump has threatened to recess the Congress (a constitutional unknown, written for a time when congressional members arrived by horseback) so that he can appoint controversial Cabinet members in spite of the Senate’s duty to “advise and consent” to all of Trump’s appointments. The Washington Post reports that he threatens to impound (withhold) funds that Congress legitimately appropriated for specific purposes (6/11/24), zeroing out funds for items he doesn’t like.
This is illegal and unconstitutional. He plans on decapitating the House and the Senate. The best defense against a strongman who wants to consolidate power to the executive branch is to stand our ground and to “be as courageous as we can.” — Timothy Snyder, “On Tyranny.” We need to write our senators and representatives to insist on a fully functioning constitutional democracy. For example, the Senate must do the usual FBI background checks for all nominees.
The institutions must hold, though they may need to be reformed. Reforms may include an ethics code for the Supreme Court, an expansion of the House of Representatives to reflect the size of the population, a modification of the Electoral College and/or ending political gerrymandering. We must expose dark money and wrongheadedness — tariffs so high that we all suffer. If we listen to Trump carefully, he told us of the authoritarian state he wants to create. We can listen to those who exploded fireworks on election evening. We can enter conversations about different ideas. We must expose the “Big Lie” — no, not that one — but the lie that President Trump must unify the executive branch by destroying the independence of the Justice Department and weakening the independence of the Congress and courts. We must call out the oligarchs — Elon Musk and other people rich enough to manipulate the government toward themselves without the consciousness of the nation. For example, how much influence did Musk’s money buy when he alone gave more than $150 million to get low-propensity voters to the polls. If Trump circumvents the law, we must call him out “in the voting booth, in the courts and the town square.” — Kamala Harris.
Mike Myers
Battle Ground
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