The Vote

As Americans, the most important thing we own is the right to vote. If we were ever to lose that right we would soon lose every other. The United States of America would be on the way to extinction.

Donald J. Trump is attempting to rob us of the vote.

The right to vote is central to our freedom, indeed to the very existence of our country. The popular election of a chief executive was such a new idea in the 18th century that the  Framers spelled out its process at length in Article II, Section 1 (since amended) of the Constitution.

The Constitution itself has been amended no fewer than six times for the purpose of expanding suffrage: 15th Amendment, 1870, allowed voting regardless of race, color, previous condition of servitude; 17th, 1913, provided direct election of senators; 19th, 1920, allowed voting regardless of sex; 23rd, 1961, D.C. residents allowed to vote in presidential elections; 24th, 1964, banned poll taxes; and 26th, 1971, dropped voting age from 21 to 18. Additionally, many Congressional acts expanded the right to vote.

Maintaining a democracy takes work. Everyone has a part to play, and our part as voters is the most important. We decide the shape and makeup of the government.

Our elected officials do the heavy lifting, but we elect them and can remove them from office when we think they're not doing the job we elected them to do.

It all works as long as everyone plays by the rules. It worked until 2016, when the voting public suffered a psychotic break and elected¹ as president a freakish person who has no use for rules and has no history whatsoever of public service.

That person, the unpresident, Donald John Trump, believes he owns everything he controls, and he believes he controls the office of president of the United States of America. He will stop at nothing, and I mean nothing, to remain in that office.

That's why he wants to steal the vote from all of us.

Although he and his family regularly use them, Trump has long criticized mail-in ballots as a source of voting fraud. There is no truth to those claims.

Mail-in ballots are used by people who can't get to their polling place on Election Day. It's also called an absentee ballot because it was first used by Civil War soldiers far from their homes. It's still widely used by members of the armed forces and many others: disabled and/or homebound persons, business travelers, hospitalized people, people with second homes, and the Hypocrite-in-Chief and his family.

Since the beginning of this year it's been anticipated that a greater number of Americans than usual will use it to avoid exposure to COVID-19. That scares the Jackass-in-Chief because he knows a lot of those people won't vote for him, and he can't control or manipulate that part of the vote.

So he's decided to disable the U. S. Postal Service. It's like using a shotgun to kill a fly, but overkill has always been the Trump way.

He is attempting, through his puppet Postmaster General Louis Dejoy, to gut the Postal Service, making it impossible for it to get ballots to people who want them and for mail-in voters to get their ballots to their election officers by the deadline. He has removed sorting machines and other equipment and technology central to mail delivery from post offices and other stations, taken away curbside mailboxes, and will no doubt begin closing post offices wholesale if he isn't stopped.

Dejoy is a toady who essentially bought his position with a $2 million donation to the Trump campaign, and now he's doing his master's bidding: Doing his best to slow down, if not stop, mail delivery, and lying through his teeth about the state of the Postal Service.

Ten states now have universal mail-in voting: California, Colorado, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, and Washington. Need I say that nine of them are "blue" states? Denying the vote to those states alone will disenfranchise approximately 29 million Americans.

Then there are the approximately 650,000 military personnel whom Trump claims to value who won't be able to vote.

The most bizarre thing about this is that Trump seems not to understand that he's disenfranchising members of both parties. He doesn't care. when he has an idea in his diseased mind he pursues it relentlessly.

Congress might be able to do something about the situation, but they're treating it all as business as usual, and have all gone home for their summer break. That, I say, is unconscionable. The economy is in a mess, people have no money, our most important right is at peril, and they're on vacation.

I don't know about you, but that's not what I voted for them to do.

And every day they're out of their offices the Idiot Child-in-Chief is running amok in Washington, looking for other institutions to destroy.

Someone needs to be finding a way to invoke the 25th Amendment, and I sure as hell don't think it's going to get done on vacation.

Messing with our right to vote is the most dangerous thing Trump has yet done.

I truly don't understand why someone hasn't shot him before now. He is guilty of treason and bribery, both impeachable offenses according to the Constitution. He lied when he took the oath of office because he never intended to respect it. He is clearly out of his mind, as many of us have now said for months.

Congress is on vacation. And they wonder why their approval rating is approaching single digits?

The Postal Service Inspector General has reportedly begun an investigation, but someone needs to be holding their feet to the fire if there are going to be results in time to help the situation.

We in turn have to hold our Congressional representatives' feet to that fire. Call them, email them, be a pain in their ass until you can get assurance from them that they will put the Postal Service scandal at the very top of their agenda and not check it off until we can all see some demonstrable and acceptable progress.

1,000 Americans are dying daily from COVID-19 and Congress can't figure out how to get money to those who need it. And they go on vacation?

I think we need to take a hard look at who's paying for that vacation.


--- Diogenes, 8/16/2020


¹ I know Hillary won the popular vote; the Electoral College elected Trump.