Official Republican policy over the past eight years has
been to delegitimize the presidency of Barack Obama, and it looks as if the GOP
is prepared to follow the same strategy in a Hillary Clinton administration.
The examples of the Obama delegitimacy campaign are many:
The dozens of attempts to overturn the Patient Protection and Affordable Care
Act; the Trump-led campaign to suggest Obama was not born in the United States;
the outrageous letter GOP senators sent directly to Iranian leaders; the
arrangement of a speech by a foreign head of government without White House
participation; the historic refusal even to consider the President’s Supreme
Court nominee; and the shutting down of the government in 2013, which cost the
United States about $24 billion.
We can see the development of the same obstreperous approach
even before all votes are cast: Let’s start with the crazy Trump assertion that
the Clinton campaign is somehow colluding with the news media and state
election officials (who nationwide are overwhelmingly Republican) to rig the
election. To be sure, Trump’s major reasons for making this absurd claim are to
justify his loss to his large but extremely fragile ego, to continue his
code-word campaign against minorities, and to distract the media and public
from the Republican’s long-term campaign to suppress the votes of minorities
and the young. But one ramification of his mendacious screeds about election
rigging is to delegitimize the election, and by implication, Hillary’s
presidency. Recent
stories in the news media suggest that many are falling for Trump’s
accusations.
But Trump is not alone in planting seeds of doubt about the legitimacy
of a Hillary presidency. More
than 50 House Republicans have urged the Justice Department to appoint
a special prosecutor to investigate whether Clinton Foundation donors had
unusual access to Hillary Clinton while she served as Secretary of State. GOP Congressperson Jason
Chavetz, who recently became the poster boy for flip-flopping because of his
off-again, on-again support of Trumpty-Dumpty, promises an investigation of
Clinton’s term as Secretary of State lasting two years if he maintains his
position as chair of the House Oversight Committee. Tom Filton, current
president of the ultra-right Judicial Watch, has coined the expression
“preemptive impeachment” to describe his plans for a Republican Congress.
It’s not just a GOP-dominated House of Representatives that will try to
delegitimize Hillary’s presidency. GOP Senators Ted Cruz, John McCain and Pat
Toomey have all explicitly promised to block any and all Supreme Court nominations
that Hillary might make. With three justices over the age of 75, we could be
down to five Supreme Court if the Republicans make good on this threat.
To whom will pledging to obstruct the operation of government for
another four years appeal? Those who think banning all
abortions is the most important issue. Ultra-rich folk who are so selfish
that they want to minimize their taxes, even if it means destroying public
education and letting our roads and bridges continue to crumble. Large
industrial concerns that will suffer if we get serious about fighting global
warming and don’t care that the pursuit of clean energy and environmentally friendly
business practices will give the economy a large boost. Then there are the racists
and those who in their hearts think that women are inferior. Sounds like a
rather large basket of deplorables to me.
But they do not represent a majority of Americans, and they don’t even
represent all of the Republican Party. A majority of Americans understand that
man-made global warming (I hate the euphemistic “climate change”) is happening.
Most want to raise the minimum wage, make college more affordable and invest
more in our decaying infrastructure. Most Americans, especially among the
young, believe in an open, pluralistic society.
Perhaps most significantly, most Americans are tired of Washington’s
gridlock and the endless political sniping that has dominated 16 or the last 24
years of American government, that is, the years when Democrats held the White
House. Because of news media conflation, many Americans have faulted both sides
of the aisle for this ugly political bickering, but the unfolding of the 2016
election cycle has made it obvious that in fact, the Republicans and the
Republicans alone are responsible for gridlock by their failure to accept the
results of elections.
There is only one way to give Hillary Clinton a chance to fulfill the
vision for which an unprecedented landside of Americans will likely vote on
November 8. The American people must also give Democrats a majority in both the
House of Representatives and the Senate. With a majority of both houses,
Hillary can get a lot accomplished from the most progressive platform in
American history by a major party. She can make college affordable, raise the
minimum wage, invest in infrastructure, alternative fuels and public education
and even raise taxes on the ultra-wealthy. Without a majority on both houses,
her presidency will face the constant stonewalling of Republicans and her
administration is forced will be forced to wallow in investigation after
investigation.
That’s why in this election, everyone who wants to end governmental
gridlock—Democrats, Republicans, independents, Libertarians and Greens—must
vote a straight-line Democratic ticket, at least for national and state-wide
offices. Only racists, the ultra-wealthy and anti-woman extremists have
anything to gain from a divided government. Moreover, a historic defeat may
enable sensible, unhypocritical Republicans who believe in abiding by election
results, such as Jeff Flake, Evan McMillan, John Kasich and Meg Whitman, to
take control of the Republican Party.
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