This is NOT My Constitution
The Slide toward Authoritarian Rule is Over . . . the Authoritarians have prevailed. Can we still escape the Black Hole Event Horizon Signaling the Death of the American Idea?
For nearly two weeks I have been starting this column over and over and over. Each day seems to bring a new outrage, most from the chambers of the United States Supreme Court, but a few self inflicted by the Biden administration.
What began with the Dobbs decision, among others, has suddenly snowballed into not only a full-out assault on personal freedom and bodily integrity but on full-out authoritarianism.
Then there was the debate . . .
If we had each listened to the individual parts of the debate we would have judged BOTH candidates presentations unmitigated disasters. Trump spent 90 minutes telling one lie after another. Proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is not worthy of leading the country we love, but Biden’s performance was so awful that none of us even noticed Trump’s.
Now its up to Joe Biden to decide what is next for him. Like George Washington who was called an “American Cinncinnatus” after the great Roman General, for making the selfless decision not to run again. But like Washington, he must act decisively. There is not a moment to waste. Particularly in light of the descent into hell which a thoroughly corrupt Supreme Court has plunged us with its last two decisions.
We took for granted that we had some time to plan and fight back. What had seemed to be a troubling, but gradual, slide into authoritarianism over the years since 2016, suddenly has become a full-blown plunge into a darkness that threatens everything we have believed about America. . . A Black Hole from which there may be no escape.
First there was the “Chevron” decision that overturned decades of precident in environmental protection, financial oversight, health and safety standards.
A brief explanation of Chevron can be summarized by the following: When a legislative body, congress or a state legislature, empowers an administrative agency, like EPA for example, to protect the public from toxic chemicals the law recognized that the best way to assure that the agency could continue to keep up with the thousands of new products coming onto the market would be to presume that the oversight authority should reside with those government agencies who have the training and expertise that would allow them to provide genuine scientific oversight.
For nearly three decades this system has worked well until the corporate interests figured out how to “game” the system. They did it by taking a two track approach: First, complain about how difficult and expensive it was for them to bring their products to market and beg for relief; then, as a backup, they have created a system for capturing the agencies with financial “assistance and incentives” to “augment” the salaries of employees.
The SCOTUS decision on Chevron has put the authority for regulating environmental toxins, financial misdeeds, etc, squarely in the control of the judicial system, where judges have no clue and therefore corporate interests will run roughshod.
Then came the SCOTUS decision on Presidential immunity. For all intents and purposes the Supreme Court has given carte blanche to any president that can commit crimes against any American citizen by simply determining that evidence of the crime can be masked from the public by simply declaring that the evidence for misdeeds is protected by virtue of being an official act.
The final tsunami for me came when the Republican State Representative with whom I took my first oath of office, pledging allegiance to the US Constitution, said sadly to me. “I live here in North America but I think I am no longer an American. Everything that I pledged my loyalty to, in the army and the legislature has been taken from us. We have gone from a country governed by the rule of law to the rule of the authoritarian.
The other twenty columns I have been working on hardly seem worth the effort at the moment.
As the great American philosopher Ron White says: “You can’t fix stupid.”