government

It’s not a “health care” debate

~ ianrandalstrock ~ Leave a comment

One of the big topics related to the government right now is the ongoing debate over “health care.” Specifically, allowing the Affordable Care Act subsidies to expire, finding a better way to pay for health care, and blaming the other side for the mess we’re in (well, that last is pretty standard for every issue at the federal level). As a person who tries to use words precisely, to best communicate my thoughts to you, I cringe every time a politician or pundit says “health care,” because that’s never what they mean.

Health care is when I go to the doctor and say “this hurts.” The doctor checks me out, diagnoses what is causing the hurt, and treats it (or tells me what to do) so that it stops hurting. That’s health care. And in that respect, health care in the United States is great. We have excellent doctors and nurses and physician assistants and therapists and… a whole slew of people who do remarkable things to make us feel better and keep us healthy, along with the equipment and medications and more. And none of that is what they mean when the politicians and reporters talk about health care.

No, what they’re talking about is “health insurance”: a system of paying for the health care we get that keeps us going. And health insurance in the United States is a disaster, falling apart and falling fast. And none of the tweaks they keep proposing at each other are going to fix the health insurance industry, because we’ve been misusing it and expecting far more from it than it can ever possibly provide.

The thing is, health insurance isn’t some unending pool of money which pays for our every smallest medical need. Health insurance—indeed, any form of “insurance” (except the half-wager when you’re playing blackjack and the dealer has an ace showing)—is a collection of people betting on something they hope won’t happen.

Start with something slightly less controversial: car insurance. You pay a small amount every year to someone managing the money (the insurance company), against the (hopefully very small) chance of being in a crash and requiring a lot of money to repair your car (or one your actions damaged). This only works if there are a lot of people paying in for this insurance and very few of them actually get in crashes requiring large pay outs. In the ideal world, if you had enough money to cover those potential expenses, you wouldn’t bother buying insurance; you’d just pay the repair/replacement costs yourself if you ever needed to (I’m ignoring your responsibility for the other guy’s car, and why states require car insurance). What this all means is that most people pay for car insurance and don’t ever get any money from it, because the entire group of people is funding the expenses of the one or two people who will wind up actually needing it. It only works because relatively few people need it, and no one knows if they are going to be that one person who does. So everybody pays a little, and most never get anything but peace of mind from it.

Health insurance is similar to car insurance. At least, it used to be. You would pay a small amount every year against the (statistically) small chance of having a catastrophic illness or injury that would be very expensive to treat. And the few people who did have such needs would have their expenses paid for by the insurance company (again, in an ideal world), while everyone else in the insurance pool would wipe the sweat from their brows and say “I’m glad I wasn’t the one who needed the money.”

But health care has evolved. Most people used to only see a doctor when they had a major injury or illness. As we’ve developed more of the concept of wellness care, more and more of us go for regular check-ups, low-level medical treatments to prevent (or earlier detect) major problems, and so forth.

And while these are (theoretically) inexpensive health care events, we now expect “insurance” to pay for them all. (Admittedly, the costs of those inexpensive events have been rising, too. And if our politicians were serious about this whole debate, that is where they would be focusing: why does it cost hundreds of dollars for a regular check-up?) But as we expect most people to have those regular check-ups and those preventative treatments, we’re over-stressing the ability of health insurance to cover the catastrophic costs it was designed for. That’s not a fault of insurance; it isn’t a money-multiplier. Way back when, if everyone paid $100 a month for insurance, it was against the fear that one person in a hundred would have a medical problem this year that might cost $100,000 to treat. At those numbers, the insurance pool was sufficient.

But today, we’ve gotten to the stage where, instead of everyone paying in against the rare major need, everyone is paying in their $100 a month… and everyone is expecting insurance to pay the doctor $400 for our “see me in six months” regular check-ups, and we’re expecting insurance to pay for the $25-a-month prescription medicine, and suddenly there’s no money in the insurance pool for the $5,000 the emergency room is going to charge to treat your broken leg, and that $100,000 expense will be enough to bankrupt the insurance company.

The failure is that we’ve spent a couple of generations teaching people that medical treatment is health care, and it’s not just for emergencies, but that everyone should seek it out continually as a preventative. Medically, that’s a good thing. But financially, it may be ruinous. Our methods of paying for it have not kept up.

The recently signed discharge petition means the House of Representatives is going to vote on an extension of the Affordable Care Act subsidies sometime in January. Even if it passes, it’s not going to fix anything, because the entire concept of health insurance is broken. I readily admit that I don’t have the solution, either. But someone smarter than all of us is going to have to figure it out. Because if it’s something we expect most people to use, then the only way to pay for it is individually. And the costs have risen so far so fast that most people simply can not afford to pay for it.

The president’s proposed fix—“we’ll just give everyone $2,000, rather than paying the insurance companies”—is naive at best. Where is the government getting the money to give everyone $2,000? The same place the government gets all its money: from the people. It’s a non-starter.

Indeed, the whole debate has become the Second Law of Thermodynamics for finance: if everyone is paying for insurance, but everyone expects to use it, then insurance is nothing more than a drain on everyone’s wallet.

Blackjack table image by Frerk Meyer, shared under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7e/Blurry_blackjack_table.jpg/640px-Blurry_blackjack_table.jpg

How Donald Trump intends to stay in office beyond January 20, 2029

~ ianrandalstrock ~ Leave a comment

Is this all far-fetched, doom-and-gloom, dystopian theorizing? Probably. I hope certainly. Nevertheless, it is a topic of conversation which keeps cropping up, so…

I know how Donald Trump is going to attempt to stay in office beyond the end of his term. It’s Section 3 of the 20th Amendment. Section 3 talks about who shall become President or act as President (two different things) if there is no President elect or if the President elect is not qualified to serve as President. The final clause of that Section reads “the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President elect nor a Vice President elect shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice President shall have qualified.” In other words, if the election is somehow prevented from occurring—and despite Article II, Section 1, and Amendment 20, Section 1—I think Donald Trump’s sycophants are relying on this phrase to enable the Congress to “select” him to “act” as President “until a President or Vice President shall have qualified” (by being elected).

This revelation came while I was researching the essay I thought I was going to write, noting that, regardless of what Trump and the Trumpians try to do to the election of 2028, a lack of an incoming President does not enable the current President to remain in office.

I was going to quote Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, which says the President “shall hold his office during the Term of four Years”—thus limiting the time the President serves to four years, whether a successor has been elected or not.

I was going to go on to the 12th Amendment, which says “…no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.” Thus preventing the President from becoming Vice President, only to succeed to the Presidency with the removal of the new President.

Then comes the first Section of the 20th Amendment: “The terms of the President and the Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January, and the terms of Senators and Representatives at noon on the 3d day of January, of the years in which such terms would have ended if this article had not been ratified; and the terms of their successors shall then begin.” Repeating and emphasizing the Article II quote above: the President’s term ends, regardless of whether or not there is a successor waiting.

And, of course, the first Section of the 22nd Amendment: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.”

But then I stumbled upon Section 3 of the 20th Amendment, as I said above. That’s the “well, there may be a way around the Constitution” that the most ardent Trumpians have been hinting at. It’s fairly simple, if we assume they can somehow prevent the next Presidential election. And one doesn’t have to be too creative to figure out ways to do that: declare a state of emergency, ban gatherings “for public safety” during the first week in November, so that an election cannot be held (that’s why they keep pushing to get rid of mail-in ballots and early voting; so that there will be no ballots to count). Or, perhaps easier, would be to look at the fifth paragraph of Article II, Section 1: “The Congress may determine the Time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.” Such an emergency declaration could simply prevent the Electors from gathering to cast their votes in December. No electoral votes, therefore nothing to count on January 6, and no President elect. Blocking that, rather than the general election, would mean that there would still be a new Congress elected who would then be charged with selecting that person who shall act as President.

Therefore, Congress needs to adopt a new law, by a veto-proof margin, saying “No person who is ineligible to be elected President may act as President.”

Donald Trump is Congress’ Fault

~ ianrandalstrock ~ 1 Comment

As angry as I am with many of President Trump’s statements and actions—some of which are immoral and unworthy of the presidency, and some of which are demonstrably criminal—my ire today is reserved for Congress and the Supreme Court. Part of the genius of our Constitution is that it organized a government that is not dictated solely by one person or one body, but rather has three co-equal branches, each of which has certain powers over the other two, and other responsibilities to the other two. As we learned in elementary school: the Legislative branch (Congress) makes the laws, the Executive branch (the President and his departments) enforces the laws, and the Judicial branch (the Supreme Court) interprets the laws (tells us what they mean, and if they are in keeping with the Constitution).

The President appoints the members of the Supreme Court, but the Senate has to agree. The President spends the money, but only according to the budget that Congress creates. Congress writes the laws that the President can veto or accept, but the Supreme Court can say “no, that law is not Constitutional.” Congress can remove the President and the members of the Supreme Court for “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

According to Article I of the Constitution, Section 8, the powers of Congress include the power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises; to regulate commerce with foreign nations; to declare war; “to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions”; and a slew of others.

Article II, Section 2, lists the powers of the President, including serving as the Commander in Chief of the Army, Navy, and Militia, “when called into the actual Service of the United States”; making treaties, appointing ambassadors, Supreme Court judges, “and all other Officers of the United States,” all “by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate”; and other things.

Article III vests “the judicial Power of the United States” in the Supreme Court and other inferior courts. Section 3, interestingly reads “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”

This system of checks and balances among the three co-equal sections of the United States government worked pretty well for a long time. The relative power of the executive and legislative branches waxed and waned over the decades, but all three branches maintained their shared powers through the strength of their leaders over the years. Congressional leaders have worked with and against presidents, the Supreme Court has allowed and denied laws over the years, but always, the holders of those offices upheld the power of their position, the importance of their branch, and kept the tripod standing.

Lately, the tripod has collapsed, because two of those legs have been allowed to weaken before the onslaught of the third. Obviously, this collapse has been going on for longer than just the last decade, but no one looking at Ronald Reagan’s relationship with Tip O’Neill ever thought either one of them was subservient to the other. Since that time, however, we’ve been stuck with a series of ideologues who realized that the way to enforce their partisan will long beyond their service would be to enable a collapse of the system of checks and balances. Thus, Mitch McConnell’s lies and machinations have unbalanced the Supreme Court: in early 2016, he told us the Senate could not appoint a new Supreme Court justice during an election year, and kept Antonin Scalia’s seat vacant for 11 months, until Donald Trump’s election. Four years later, McConnell told us to ignore his four-year-old words, and that the Senate had to fill a vacant Supreme Court seat when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died a month and a half before the election of 2020. That’s the same Mitch McConnell who, on January 6, 2021, called Donald Trump “practically and morally responsible” for the attack on the Capitol, but then voted to acquit Trump of those charges at his second impeachment. McConnell is no longer the leader of the Senate, but his successor, John Thune, has not shown himself to be any more of a leader. His every utterance proclaims his subservience to the office of the President.

Chief Justice John Roberts has used his ideological majority of the Court to grant the president nearly complete immunity for anything he may do during his term of office, since the president in question supports his views. He also can’t imagine any of our recent or potential presidents hailing from the Democratic party ever running so far beyond the pale as Donald Trump has, so he’s not worried about karma coming back.

And now we have the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, who has completely subsumed his authority to Donald Trump’s will. He has decided the House shouldn’t actually be conducting any business, because the president is happier to have the government shut down, so he can rampage however he wants.

The Supreme Court, unfortunately, is beyond our power to correct in the near term. The way the Justices are chosen requires waiting for those currently in office to leave in order to replace them. And let’s face it, there doesn’t appear to be anyone even on the horizon with the strength of John Marshall or the moral fiber of David Davis.

The make-up Congress, however, is—at least, theoretically (but see my several previous pieces on Gerrymandering)—something we can affect. I say it is time to elect Senators and Representatives who will stand up, not necessarily for me and my views, but for the strength of the Congress. Congress needs to restore itself to its role as a co-equal branch of the government.

Far too often, among the Republicans and Trumpians in the Congress, we see people who are far more interested in doing what Trump wants so that he won’t attack them. Can they possibly be proud of their service? Or are they merely keeping their seats warm? Liz Cheney stood up for right over party, and was punished for it by losing her seat. But as much as I disagree with many of her views, she earned my respect. The problem was, she was one voice in a vast sea of the voiceless, and thus, easy to target. The other members of Congress need to find their voices, to stand up, not to keep knuckling under.

I may not have agreed with their policies or their actions, but did anyone ever doubt the Congressional allegiance, the strength, the patriotism, of prior Senate Majority Leaders such as Robert Byrd, Mike Mansfield, Everett Dirksen, Lyndon Baines Johnson, or Henry Cabot Lodge? Similarly, will the House of Representatives ever feel the need to remember the service of Mike Johnson as it does Tip O’Neill, Carl Albert, Sam Rayburn, or Nicholas Longworth?

Donald Trump has gone off the rails. He cares nothing for the Constitution, law, or tradition, and is interested only in lining his own pockets and glorifying his own name. But if the rest of the government was functioning as it should, the damage Trump could inflict would be minimized. But with the Supreme Court saying only “Yes, sir,” while Congress’s leaders say “We’ll do whatever Trump wants,” our government, our nation, is in danger.

And yes, I know I’ve not mentioned the Democratic leaders. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, too, are falling down on their jobs. They’re doing what they can in their minorities, but it sure feels like they could be doing, could be saying, more. And their younger colleagues, the flaming liberal branch of the party who don’t recognize that good government is negotiation, compromise, and not getting everything? They, too, are not doing us any favors.

Term limits are not, and never have been, the answer. But whether you vote Republican or Democratic, I urge you—in the strongest terms possible—to vote for someone who wants to serve in Congress, not someone who wants only to kowtow to or attack the president.

The First Thing We Do: Let’s Gather All the Generals

~ ianrandalstrock ~ Leave a comment

Of all the crap flying around, I find this one very worrying. The Washington Post is reporting that “Hegseth orders rare, urgent meeting of hundreds of generals, admirals.” That is, the Secretary of Defense has apparently called an in-person gathering of nearly all the generals and admirals in the US military. No reason for the gathering has been released.

I don’t want to go all “conspiracy theorist” on this one, but the fiction writer part of my brain is having a field day:

Will the president be declaring martial law, and getting the troops under these commanders out in the streets?

Is this a plan to leave our troops in the field without senior leadership, to let some foreign adversary walk all over them?

Will they be threatened to get into line or disappear into some deep, dark hole?

Is there a plan to remove or kill the generals, to replace them with loyalists?

Let me repeat: this is the fiction writer in me, with no proof and no evidence but the call to gather. Nevertheless, in an era when the term “unprecedented” has become commonplace, such a gathering truly is unprecedented, and thus open to misinterpretation when no reason is given.

We Are the Frog

~ ianrandalstrock ~ Leave a comment

I’m starting to feel like the frog in the slowly heating pot of water.

National Guard troops patrolling Los Angeles. A judge just ruled it’s a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, but that ruling doesn’t change much.

The military take-over of the federal district. “Crime is out of control,” according to the White House, though the city’s administration says those figures are a lie. No matter who’s right, we’re becoming inured to seeing troops in the streets.

Talk of next sending the troops into Chicago or some other major city. We’ll survive that, won’t we? After all, New Yorkers have gotten used to heavily armed people in fatigues at major events and gatherings. Those troops may not have chosen to be here, but we still have to thank them for their service.

Pair that increasing military presence at home with the spate of national emergencies the president is in love with declaring: the national emergency over immigration that the administration is using to justify increasing number of deportations. And the national emergency over international trade that was the justification for illegally imposed tariffs. And now there’s talk of the president declaring a national emergency over housing, because people in their 20s and 30s can’t afford to buy houses, because not enough new houses are being built.

Add in the president’s continual whining about that elections aren’t “secure,” that we can’t trust the mail-in paper ballots, or the electronic voting machines, or any other facet of the system, and that the federal government is going to have to take over the machinery of elections, just to ensure that they’re fair.

Do you see where this is going? This is all in the first seven months of this presidential administration. We are being inculcated to the steady stream of major emergencies demanding extraordinary governmental intervention. We are being taught to distrust the institutions of free and open government that have served us so well for two centuries. And we are growing desensitized to the elements of control such as the Army patrolling our cities.

It isn’t very much of a leap of reasoning to imagine we’ll be told we have to respond to some emergency in the summer of 2028, while the government is trying to make our electoral system “safe,” which will require a delay in election day, perhaps “just a few months.”

I think we’re in trouble. I feel the temperature of this water rising, but will we be smart enough to turn off the gas before it starts boiling?

Don’t do as I did

~ ianrandalstrock ~ Leave a comment

President Trump on Monday tweeted about his dismissal of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. His “reasoning” is that he claims Cook made false statements on mortgage documents, which was evidence of “gross negligence” and “potentially criminal.”

The evidence he is basing this decision on? Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi accusing Cook of taking out mortgages for homes in Michigan and Georgia in 2021, and telling banks in both cases that she planned to use the homes as her primary residences. Pulte alleges that was a fraudulent attempt to gain more favorable lending terms. Cook has not been convicted of anything, not even been indicted. But Caesar’s wife must be above reproach.

Sound familiar?

In the case commonly known as New York v Trump (2023–2024), the judge ruled that “In order to borrow more and at lower rates, defendants submitted blatantly false financial data to the accountants, resulting in fraudulent financial statements.”

The pot calling the kettle back? It takes one to know one? The crime he’s accusing Cook of committing is the smaller version of the crime of which he was convicted. He says it’s a disqualifying crime (mind you, the accusation; there has been no trial) to serve on the Fed’s Board of Governors, but that the much larger version (which was adjudicated) is not disqualifying for him to serve as president.

I’m embarrassed that he’s the president, and I’m scared of what he’ll do next.

Trump says he’s fired Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook

People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, Allen Weisselberg, Jeffrey McConney, The Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, The Trump Organization, Inc., Trump Organization LLC, DJT Holdings LLC, DJT Holdings Managing Member, Trump Endeavor 12 LLC, 401 North Wabash Venture LLC, Trump Old Post Office LLC, 40 Wall Street LLC, Seven Springs LLC

Embrace the Gerrymander!

~ ianrandalstrock ~ 2 Comments

The Republican redistricting scheme currently causing so much consternation in and toward Texas gives me hope. Not, perhaps, in the way you might think. But in it, I see the seeds of potentially, maybe, if if if, a solution to the gerrymandering that has plagued this country for two centuries.

Allow me to explain.

I’ve been railing against gerrymandering for years. Gerrymandering is the drawing of boundaries on political districts in order to group blocks of voters together, either to increase the power of one group, or to decrease the power of another. Sometimes it is used to increase the chances that a member of a minority group can win an election. But far more often these days, it is used to cement a political party’s hold on a district, to make it “safe.” (For the problems safe districts cause, see my previous writings.)

In normal times, Congressional district boundaries are redrawn every ten years, after the decennial census data is received, so that the districts accurately represent where the people live and what those people want. These are not normal times.

Governor Abbott of Texas, kowtowing to President Trump’s request, is urging the Texas legislature to redraw the state’s Congressional map right now, half-way through a decennial period, in order to concentrate the Democratic minority voters into fewer districts, and thus give the Republicans, potentially, three to five more seats in the House of Representatives. Democratic members of the Texas legislature have left the state, in order to prevent the legislature from reaching a quorum, which would—at least, in theory— prevent action on the proposal. But they’ve tried such a quorum-break in the past; it has not been successful. I doubt it will be this time, either.

So we have to accept the reality that Texas is about to further marginalize their Democratic population and flip five of their seats in the House to the Republican party.

Governor Newsom of California has been making noises about attempting the same scheme in his state, which would flip several seats from the Republicans to the Democrats. There’ve been whispers elsewhere—such as Governor Hochul in New York—that other states might do something similar if Abbot and Trump get their way in Texas. The problem I foresee is an ongoing character flaw of the Democrats: the party insists that it must be holier than thou, purer than thou, that it will play be the rules even when their opponents have shown absolutely no compunction about violating those rules. While doing so may give them a moral victory, it will inevitably lead to an actual loss. To my mind, in these cases, the Democrats are those crying “life isn’t fair.” No, it isn’t. Everyone should follow the rules. Everyone should be a good, moral, decent human being. Everyone should be more interested in the good of us all than in our individual results.

But not everyone is.

We don’t need Governor Newsom and Governor Hochul warning “don’t do it or we might do something, too.” We need him and his fellow Democratic governors to act! Today! We need them to implement precisely the schemes Abbot and the Texans are planning. We need to gerrymander the country to a fare-thee-well, to legislate out of existence those last 40 competitive seats in the House.

Because then, and only then, will we all see just how egregious the gerrymandering has become. Only then will it be brought to the Supreme Court. And to my mind, regardless of the Court’s political slant, there is no way it can allow such outrageous diminution of the minorities to survive. In such a case, I think, the Supreme Court will only be able to rule that the gerrymandering violates the people’s rights to be fairly represented, and that political maps must be drawn in a fair, impartial manner.

(Yes, I know, I’m an idealist. It may not work out that way. But I don’t see any other way to fix the mess we’re in.)

And if, IF my dream comes true, may I humbly suggest new legislation regarding how districts are drawn? A fairly simple test, actually:

No Congressional district, when drawn on a Mercator projection map, shall be drawn in such a way that a straight line drawn on that map shall be able to cross into the district more than once. That is, except in cases where the state border itself violates this dictum.

I don’t expect any of this to happen. I expect the Democrats will continue to purge their own ranks, as they threw out Al Franken. I expect they’ll yell and whine and do nothing, while Texas rejiggers their Congressional map, and that the election of 2026 will result in a Trumpian increase in the House, and we’ll continue bitching and moaning about their self-serving actions for years to come.

But wouldn’t it be nice if I was wrong, and we could actually make things better?


Democrats flee Texas to block Republican redistricting map backed by Trump


Texas Democrats arrive in Illinois to block vote back home on redrawn House maps sought by Trump


Limited options for Democrats to retaliate if Texas Republicans redraw congressional map

First Men In Office

~ ianrandalstrock ~ Leave a comment

A quick story on ABC’s noon news just now noted that Mikie Sherrill, who is the Democratic nominee for governor of New Jersey, has chosen Dale Caldwell as her running mate, and that if they win, he will be the first male lieutenant governor of New Jersey.

That caught my ear. While we have (or are much closer to) equality of the sexes, I know enough of our history to know it was not always the case, and that a claim that a political office holder will be the first man to hold the office is strange.

So I did a little research. The quote is accurate, but demands a slightly longer explanation, which is that in New Jersey, until recently, the governor was the only official elected state-wide. If the governor’s office became vacant, it would be filled by the president of the State Senate, or by the speaker of the General Assembly. The position of lieutenant governor was created in 2006, and first filled in the election of 2009. To date, the entire list of lieutenant governors of New Jersey is: Kim Guadagno (served January 19, 2010–January 16, 2018); Sheila Oliver (January 16, 2018–August 1, 2023 [she died in office]); and Tahesha Way (September 8, 2023–present).

Indeed, I can’t think of any other American political office to have been held exclusively by women at any point (excepting First Lady and Second Lady [until Doug Emhoff from 2021 to 2025]). Frances Perkins was the first woman to serve in a president’s cabinet, but she was the fourth Secretary of Labor. The 46th and current Treasurer of the United States, Brandon Beach, is the first man to hold that position in 76 years, since the 28th Treasurer, William Alexander Julian, who served June 1, 1933–May 29, 1949 (but all of his predecessors were men).

Over-reacting to show political strength

~ ianrandalstrock ~ Leave a comment

In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Shakaar” (season 3, episode 24; first aired May 22, 1995), a new political leader clashes with a political rival over the return of some farming equipment. The rival and his fellow farmers are using the equipment; the leader thinks it would be better used somewhere else. The leader, Kai Winn, asks Major Kira to talk with her friends—Shakaar and the farmers—to return the equipment, thinking that Kira’s prior relationship with them will turn the tide. Kira is unsuccessful, so Winn calls out the militia to take the equipment back by force, deeming Shakaar’s continued reticence a threat to the stability of the government, and a test of her set by the gods. She eventually calls on Commander Sisko to bring Federation forces to support her efforts. Sisko tells her this is an over-reaction, noting that she has done everything to escalate the situation far beyond reason, rather than acting as a leader to calm things down. Eventually, our heroes are able to bring a political counter-punch, and Winn backs down to end the episode.

The whole story is ringing in my ears today as I’m watching the outrageous escalation in Los Angeles, brought about through President Trump’s nationalizing and sending in the National Guard to deal with protests against policies that he himself set. Once again, we’re looking at an outrageous over-reaction apparently designed solely to solidify the over-reactor’s political position. California’s Governor Newsom and Los Angeles’s Mayor Bass have both said there is no need for federal troops to calm the protests, and that they will only inflame the situation. But Trump seems to see it as either a test set by his god, or an opportunity (akin to his forthcoming military parade) to show he is the power, he is the strength, he is the ruler. Once again, he is showing us he has no interest in being the president of a democratic republic, that he would much rather be the strongman in a dictatorship that benefits only himself and his friends.

The situation in Los Angeles is indeed a test. It may be the first volley in a test not unlike the one Abraham Lincoln described in his Gettysburg Address, when he spoke of a nation conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” We are engaged in the struggle to guarantee that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

[Edited a day later to add:]

A friend pointed out to me that I might not have been clear in the above. I wasn’t saying the entire situation started with the call for troops, that that was the only escalation. It was merely the tipping point that prompted me to write.

But the Kai Winn “escalating the situation out of all legitimate proportions,” in the current situation is Donald Trump’s unceasing cries that undocumented farm workers, manual laborers, anyone who speaks Spanish and has slightly more melanin than he is a threat to the United States and our way of life. The crisis he has manufactured began with the terror he tried to instill in us: terror at the presence of the very people he frequently employed in his various real estate businesses. The violation of Posse Comitatus is only the latest step in his long con to make Americans so afraid of anyone other than Trump and his cronies that we allow them to rob us of our fortunes and freedom.

For today’s chilling extension, see Secretary Noem’s comments and actions in this article.

Even door-to-door canvassers represent the campaign

~ ianrandalstrock ~ Leave a comment

A fellow wearing a New York Police Department T-shirt just rang my doorbell, campaigning for Heshy Tischler. I told him that a political campaigner wearing that T-shirt made me uncomfortable, and he started yelling at me that he had a First Amendment right to wear the shirt because he has a relative who is a police officer. I didn’t get his name as I closed the door in his face, yet I heard him continue to yell through the door. Based on that interaction, I am far less likely to vote for Tischler for New York City Council in the upcoming special election.

The things that influence our votes.