By David Mark Greaves
I’ve never had such trepidation looking forward to a presidential election. There’s not only winning or losing. There’s almost winning or almost losing and the aftermath of fury that is possible. It is counting down the days between election and inauguration, with each day bringing new assaults on the system, leaving us to teeter on the edge, moment to moment. As his Doomsday Weapon, Trump’s signed “Executive Order on Creating Schedule F In the Excepted Service,” allowing him to fire civil servants who are not loyal to him and replace them with those who are, and will be in place to hamper the Biden / Harris Administration. This is why every vote counts for every office so that his enablers will bring his delusions to heel. We need to beat the Republicans right down the line!
It is always possible of course, that the worse could happen: the voter suppression tactics in the “swing states”, voter ID laws in Wisconsin, and the Supreme Court ruling that ballots mailed but not received in Wisconsin by November 3, will not be counted, may give him the Electoral College vote and relection, but I don’t think that will be the case. Not with early voters waiting for hours in a turnout that is shattering records cross the country. Not with young people looking at their squandered inheritance, a planet, received by the previous generations as a veritable Garden of Eden, is left to them as an overheating garbage dump.
They see a future of floods, fires, famine, pestilence, mass migrations and species extinctions, all caused by a changing climate, and they know they have to act now if the world can be saved in their lifetim
They also don’t like being ruled by people with prejudices rooted in the 1950’s. And after the first couple of conservative Supreme Court rulings, they’re going to demand more judges on the court and a hard at look lifetime appointments and the rest of the Trump judicial system as well.
Then there are the Baby Boomers, frightened at the prospect of having a broken nation as well as a broken climate as evidence of their passing, or some Republicans satisfied with packing the judiciary, can finally feel free not to support him by standing on a voting line while a pandemic rages in their state.
The amount of house cleaning President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will be faced with, an initial fumigation of the residences, the Oval Office and the rest of the executive branch, will be enough to keep them well occupied for a history-making first 100 Days.
There will be darkness, but there’s going to be a reset. A reboot. They Republican elite have overreached, and the unintended consequences of their suppression, has been a surge in voter determination and display of nothing short of patriotism. There will be a return to reality-based decision-making, starting January 20, 2021. Science will be driving the response to the novel coronavirus pandemic. There will be a multitrillion-dollar relief package for medical, individual, city and state needs. There will be multitrillion-dollar tax reform legislation. And voter will remember the hours spent in line and demand a strong anti-voter suppression effort as well.
And once we get rid of voter suppression and Republican gerrymandering, then the people’s voice will be more fully heard, and we’ll get a clearer picture of who we are as a nation. And we’ll have Donald Trump to thank for that.