Yet another half president

By

LeRoy Goldman

Guest Columnist

Citizen-Times

June 25, 2016

And then there were two, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Regardless of which one of them you support, there is no doubt that the vast majority of the American people have already cast a vote of no confidence in both. Put another way, most of us are appalled that in a nation of 320 million citizens Clinton and Trump are the best we can do. Not only are they not the best, both are destined to fail. What gnaws at all of us is the sickeningly obvious answer to a simple question. Are Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump the best America has to offer?

Understanding why neither of them has a prayer of reversing the nation’s downward spiral, is essential, not impossible to comprehend, and yet so combustible that it’s rarely articulated. It comes down to this: To be effective, president of the United States must mean president of all the United States, not president of half of the United States.

America is in the process of losing what is at the center of our national experiment in democracy. Simply put it’s the one nation, under God, indivisible notion, and the “a nation divided cannot stand” notion.

There’s a relatively easy way to understand the reality of the danger we face. We all know about the existence of Red America and Blue America. We all know which one we support. We all know who’s right. We are. And we know who’s wrong. They are. Some of us also know how the Red/Blue straitjacket has divided us today in ways that are reminiscent of the divisions that plunged the nation into Civil War about150 years ago.

What is less well understood are the forces that propel and breathe life into what has become the clear sorting out of the American people into two separate nations that no longer trust each other. They are the forces of political correctness that manifest themselves as identity politics. Like an undiagnosed and untreated malignancy, they have taken control of our political life and paralyzed our national government.

Red America is made up overwhelmingly of white men, their wives and Protestants. Blue America consists of most single and divorced women, African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Jews, Muslims and LGBTs.

Pandering to those two increasingly intolerant coalitions by career politicians in Washington has reduced civil political discourse to a gender and racial stalemate. Two examples drive home the point.

In 2014 the Supreme Court voted 6-2 in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action to uphold the state of Michigan’s voter’s 58 percent approval of a referendum that prohibited the state’s public colleges and universities from granting preferential admission based upon race. In a blistering 58 page dissent, Justice Sotomayor eleven times thundered, “race matters”.

Her illogic was that the court should have overturned the will of Michigan’s voters because in her opinion their vote showed that the election outcome was influenced by racism. Let that sink in. Her reasoning would have had the Supreme Court invalidate the vote of the people in Michigan because in her view it constituted racism.

In fact, her repeated bombast that race matters was not what she really meant. Everyone agrees race matters. What she was really saying was that for African-Americans race must matter more. Think of her dissent as a precursor to the Black Lives Matter movement, which does not mean Black Lives Matter, which, of course, they do. It really means black lives matter more than white lives. This extreme version of political correctness has become so ingrained and so pernicious that, If one has the temerity to challenge such a view, the response is assured and lethal. You’re a racist.

And now the nation is attempting to grapple with the carnage in Orlando. Trump and Red America blame Obama and Clinton for complicity and not being willing to call Omar Mateen a “radical Islamic terrorist”. Clinton, Obama, and Blue America have deemed Mateen’s rampage homegrown terrorism, a hate crime against LGBTs, and are calling for the passage of stricter gun control legislation. In the Senate these mutually opposing points of view play out in only one destructive manner that has as its principal purpose the staging of Senate votes designed to protect the backsides of vulnerable senators seeking re-election this November.

Unless and until this nation puts an end to the cancer of political correctness, we are assured more half presidents as far as the eye can see.

LeRoy Goldman lives in Flat Rock and can be reached at:

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 Drain Washington’s Great Dismal Swamp

By

LeRoy Goldman

Guest Columnist

Citizen-Times

June 3, 2016

The Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina and Virginia is a national treasure and sanctuary. The one in Washington D.C. is a vermin ridden pest hole. Let’s drain it.

America is on the verge of what will be the filthiest and most expensive presidential campaign in the nation’s history. By Election Day it’s a virtual certainty that the two presumptive nominees, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, will have spent (wasted) upwards of $2 billion in efforts to demonize each other. What’s coming is: Hillary, the crooked and trigger happy, versus Donald, the Mexican-hating, Muslim-hating misogynist.

Most of you are too busy and too sensible to spend much of your time reading the blizzard of political columns in the newspapers or listening to the nonstop rants by the biased bobble heads on Fox or MSNBC. But, if you did, you would have learned that either Hillary Clinton will win in a breeze, or that the election will be very close. How helpful is that? It’s not.

But, if this election turns out to be close, as is likely, then here are four reforms that would play a decisive role in determining who wins, what sort of mandate the President-elect will have, and who controls the Senate and the House of Representatives when the 115th Congress convenes next January.

Abolish the Electoral College

We say we believe in majority rule and one person, one vote. We don’t. The Electoral College is an undemocratic anachronism. It makes irrelevant the votes of Democrats for the presidency in many states such as Texas, South Carolina, and Kansas. Similarly, it makes irrelevant the votes of Republicans in many other states like California, Illinois, and Maryland. In 2000 it led to election of a president who lost the popular vote by more than 500,000 votes. Abolish it by constitutional amendment.

Abolish House Rules Committee

Republican and Democratic Speakers of the House use the House Rules Committee to strangle the legislative process. At their direction the Rules Committee routinely issues “closed” rules that circumscribe debate on the House floor for virtually all major legislation. The Closed Rule precludes the Minority party from offering amendments to the legislation. It’s the mechanism that currently enables the radical House Republican Freedom Caucus to subvert the legislative process. Abolishing the Rules Committee would open the legislative process and restore compromise and comity in the House.

Abolish the Senate filibuster

Originally intended to be used rarely and only under extraordinary circumstances, the Senate filibuster has become the weapon of choice for both Democrats and Republicans to paralyze the Senate when they are in the minority. Its automatic use by the Senate Minority makes a mockery of Senate procedure. Its repeated use needlessly fosters enmity between Democrats and Republicans. The beginning of the 115th Congress next January offers the opportunity for the Senate to change its rules and abolish the egregious abuse of the filibuster.

Reform the federal bureaucracy

Like the secret, all-powerful, and corrupt Vatican bureaucracy that does not answer to the Pope, the federal bureaucracy does not answer to the president, regardless of whether he is a Democrat or a Republican. Worse, it’s accountable to no one. And that means it can and does do whatever it wishes.

That’s how you get an IRS that abuses its authority to attack political organizations it opposes. It’s how you get a VA that is willing to murder sick veterans in order to protect its reputation, its leadership and their annual bonuses. It’s how you get the rollout of the Obamacare website that doesn’t work. It how you get a CDC that botches the response to the Ebola outbreak. Its how you get children with elevated blood-lead levels in Flint, Michigan thanks to the incompetence and irresponsibility of the EPA. The next president must have a plan to bring the federal bureaucracy to heel, rather than be its willing patsy.

Don’t underestimate the significance that advocacy for these reforms would have in determining who wins the White House. While they may seem esoteric and prosaic, the candidate who can convince the electorate that he/she is serious about ending the stalemate in Washington and knows how to do it, will win. Advocacy for these reforms will focus voter anger like a laser.

Do you know which candidate is more likely to propose these reforms? Here’s a hint. One of them has lived in and prospered from Washington’s Dismal Swamp for the past quarter century. The other has not.

LeRoy Goldman lives in Flat Rock and can be reached at:

EmailMe