Sunday, November 1, 2020

American aristocrats are stealing your voting privileges

 

"The right of suffrage is certainly one of the fundamental articles of republican Government, and ought not to be left to be regulated by the Legislature. “ - James Madison

The quote above is perhaps more relevant today than when Madison wrote it back in August of 1787 as he and other commonwealth officials met in Philadelphia to form our Constitution.  The colonies had recently won their independence from the British monarchy and wanted to inscribe for posterity the rights of individuals to choose their own representatives in the newly formed republic.

There was the lingering fear back then that aristocratic powers would unduly influence our elected officials to advantage them, often to the detriment of those less powerful people who even then were negated from voting simply because they didn’t own property, were not males and were essentially not descendants of white European immigrants - conditions that wouldn’t change for nearly 150 years all totaled.

It became apparent to Thomas Jefferson as early as 1816 that the “aristocracy of our monied corporations” was already challenging our government to a trial of strength, “and [bidding] defiance to the laws of our country.”  To this day this threat is more prevalent than ever as lobbyists from various corporate interests are appointed by corporate-friendly administrations to head up those agencies that are tasked to oversee and prevent excesses that hurt all Americans, especially the poorest and least powerful amongst us.  The “swamp” that Donald Trump promised to drain is alive and thriving.

In it’s most dangerous form this monied interests has won over in almost its entirety, the Republican Party, aided in large part by a predominant news source that has violated the ethics of a free and objective press.  This arrangement now presents the gravest threat to one of the last vestiges of our representative form of government - the right of free citizens to vote.


In his Rolling Stone article, “How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich”, Tim Dickinson laid out back in 2011 how “the modern GOP has undergone a radical transformation, reorganizing itself around a grotesque proposition: that the wealthy should grow wealthier still, whatever the consequences for the rest of us.” 

It’s not that Democrats haven’t been guilty of pandering to Wall Street but they haven’t even come close to the speed and scope that the modern GOP has.  With the aid of GOP legislators, judicial appointments deliberately skirted basic rules of fairness and laws have been written to circumvent the oversight of state and federal agencies, leaving most low and middle income voters in harms way of polluting industries, paying higher tax rates than the wealthiest amongst us, and rigging elections to favor these corporate-friendly Republicans.

And if the planned chaos during the Georgia Democratic primaries earlier this year is a preview of how the Republican Party intends to steal the 2020 presidential election for Donald Trump, we can anticipate even greater social disruptions from the likes of the QAnon crowd and many white supremacist groups, opening the door for Trump to introduce “presidential emergency action documents,” or PEADs, “which are orders that authorize a broad range of mortal assaults on our civil liberties.”  An act that could find the Executive branch at odds with some military leaders.

Regardless of the outcome on November 3rd, it behooves every American to push for reinstatement of the checks and balances the framers intended for our democratic republic to survive.  If not, the autocratic maneuvers by the Trump administration and the unwilling GOP congressional leadership to stand up to this power play could well put us in line to join the ranks of Russia, China, Turkey, North Korea and Saudi Arabia.

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