Category: politics

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life politics

Remembering The Tragic Murder of Ronald Amadon

On October 27, 1985, sometime around 2:30 A.M. in my home village in Vermont, Ronald Amadon, a food service worker at the local college, walked from one of the village’s two bars to his parents’ home about a quarter of a mile away. He had worked during the big Oktoberfest on campus and followed that with some celebrating at the bar. As he approached his parents’ home, he was attacked with a knife by John Kugler, a young man from a New York town just over the border who had recently escaped from a mental facility in New York and was now renting a mobile home in my village.

The Rutland Herald reported that a neighbor heard someone call out, “Help me! Help me!,” but the neighbor was too frightened to go outside. “[Amadon] was screaming his head off,” the neighbor said, “He was very hysterical.” Another neighbor said the victim “sounded like a woman,” while a third heard Amadon cry, “Oh my god!”

Amadon went to a nearby friend’s house, bleeding from his stab wounds, and asked his friend to call the ambulance. The friend asked who had stabbed him, and Amadon replied, “I don’t know who he is, but I’ll never forget his face.”

After calling for help, the friend reached out to Amadon’s parents, who lived just down the road. Amadon’s mother joined him in the ambulance on the way to Rutland Regional Medical Center. Tragically, he would not survive the journey.

Ronald Amadon died at 4:21 A.M. of one stab wound to the chest and one to the abdomen, as well as having cuts on his hand and lip.

Police initially stopped Kugler for a motor vehicle violation before arresting him for the murder. According to the Herald, Kugler said to a reporter, “Forgive me.”

In a later affidavit for the court, police alleged that Kugler told them “he killed Amadon when Amadon came walking past him acting like a homosexual.”

Amadon’s murder was not the only act of homophobic violence in the Rutland region in the mid-eighties. Two days later, a Herald story ran with the headline, “Rights Activists Decry Violence Directed At Gays.” The activists noted the homophobic slaying of a Brandon man in February 1984, whose “body was found on the ice at the base of a 120-foot-deep West Rutland marble quarry.”

On January 25, 1986, the Herald reported that a District Court judge ruled that, following a psychiatric assessment, “Kugler was incompetent to stand trial.” The psychiatrist found Kugler to be “suffering from delusions, paranoia, hallucinations, and possibly the scars of severe drug and alcohol abuse.” The psychiatrist reported that, as a teenager, Kugler used to sniff gasoline “until he nearly keeled over.” He later moved on to harder drugs, such as heroin and PCP.

Kugler was committed to the Vermont State Hospital in Waterbury, where psychiatrists expected him to spend the rest of his life.

Before his attack on Amadon, Kugler had been arrested in New York for assaulting another man with a large rock and a tire chain. Authorities placed him in the Capital District Psychiatric Center in Albany, but he later walked out without being stopped. Despite knowing his whereabouts before his attack on Amadon, Rutland County law enforcement could not return him to New York due to a loophole in Vermont’s laws. As the Herald reported at the time, “Vermont law has no provisions for Vermont officials returning an uncommitted mental patient to another state, as they can with criminal fugitives… With no pending criminal charges, extradition was impossible.”

Six years after the murder, in January 1992, the Herald reported that two psychiatrists found Kugler “was no longer insane and did not pose a threat to himself or others.” A judge ruled that he could be released back into the community but had to remain in state custody.

In July 1994, the Herald reported Kugler escaped from the Arroway halfway house in Burlington and “may be headed back to the Rutland area.” About ten days later, police changed their mind and said he “may be headed to New York.” The police expressed concern that Kugler could “become violent if he is no longer taking his medications” for “paranoid schizophrenia.” He later turned himself in.

But in August 1995, Kugler again escaped from psychiatric confinement, walking away from the state hospital in Waterbury. He had been staying in an unlocked ward and was allowed to roam the grounds. One day, he did not return. Kugler “turned up a week later near Philadelphia, where he was stopped by police for allegedly driving drunk.”

Meanwhile, Ronald Amadon remained murdered, dead at the age of 22, because he “acted like a homosexual.”

As you may know, June is Pride Month. It commemorates the 1969 uprising at the Stonewall Inn in New York, which became the catalyst for the modern LGBT movement for civil rights. As President Biden noted in his proclamation yesterday, “Pride is a time to recall the trials the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ+) community has endured and to rejoice in the triumphs of trailblazing individuals who have bravely fought — and continue to fight — for full equality.”

According to the Herald, Ronald Amadon “was thoughtful, quiet, and well-liked…a gentle man.” At Amadon’s funeral, Rev. Marshall Hudson-Knapp recalled, “Ron had a love for everyone he knew,” and he recited the lyrics of a song that Ronald had written as a boy, “My name is R-O-N-N-I-E. I’ll love you if you’ll love me. For that’s the way it’s meant to be.”

A friend recalled outside of the funeral, “He was a really special guy. He had a lot of friends.” He also loved antiquing and frequently stopped at area shops to browse. One store owner said, “I remember Ronnie stopping by just a few days before he died. He was a gentle and wonderful boy.”

As my village celebrates Pride for all the LGBTQ+ individuals we call our friends, family, and neighbors, we ought not to forget the ugly, homophobic tragedy that once occurred on our streets. Let us remember the life and death of Ronald Amadon.

Thanks to Monica Allen, who first reported on the case for the Rutland Herald in the 1980s, and to Liz Anderson, who followed up on the case for the Herald in the 1990s.

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politics

Flip the Filibuster’s Pain

About a month ago, in an Op-Ed titled, Make the filibuster great again, former senator Al Franken and political scientist Norman Ornstein proposed changing which party is responsible for maintaining/breaking the filibuster:

Flip the numbers. Instead of requiring 60 votes to end debate, require 41 to continue debate. Then, the majority leader could call votes any time the Senate was in session, and the minority would have to show up. Including for votes at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m., coming off their lumpy cots off the Senate floor. Around the clock. Including 87-year-old Chuck Grassley and both 86-year-olds Richard Shelby and Jim Inhofe. And soon-to-be-79-year-old Mitch McConnell. No Mondays off while only the majority ha[s] to be there. Weekends in D.C., including for the 17 Republicans up for re-election in 2022, who want to be back home campaigning.

Franken and Ornstein are onto something here. While I’m in favor of abolishing the filibuster altogether, this suggestion at reform might be acceptable to conservative Democrats such as Senators Manchin and Sinema, the former of whom recently said he’s open to making the filibuster more “painful” to use.

While Senator Sinema recently told her constituents that she supports “the 60-vote threshold on all Senate actions,” Franken and Ornstein’s proposal keeps the 60-vote threshold intact; it just flips the onus on which party has to reach it. As it stands, the majority needs to whip up 60 votes. If the Senate adopted Franken and Ornstein’s reform, the minority would have to whip 41. 

With Minority Leader McConnell’s ability to maintain party discipline makes it possible that the Republican minority would continue to take the obstructionist path, Franken predicts that the mundane realities of a “talking filibuster” would quickly run up against the stamina of the Senate’s many octogenarians.

If we’re not going to abolish the filibuster, then Franken and Ornstein’s proposal might be the best compromise.

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politics

Focus on Bipartisanship With Americans, Not With Their Politicians

In 2010, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made it clear to his Republican colleagues that their coöperation with the Obama Administration would not be tolerated, especially on healthcare reform. According to Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy, Senator McConnell (supported by the rancor of the Tea Party, which was fueled and funded by the billionaire, anti-union, libertarian-leaning Koch Brothers) used his power over committee assignments to bully Republican senators such as Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Olympia Snow of Maine from supporting a healthcare bill that, by design, consisted mostly of Republican policy proposals and was, in many ways, “the same fucking bill” as the one passed in Massachusetts by a Republican governor, Mitt Romney.

Despite having been sent to Congress to provide solutions to America’s many problems, Majority Leader McConnell’s marching orders for the Republican caucus in 2010 focused exclusively on obstructing President Obama’s agenda. Instead of working with the Democrats to ensure Republican principles were embedded in legislation, Republicans allowed themselves to be bullied by the leader and his allies into simply saying “No” to anything the Democrats tried to do.

Over the next ten years, the partisan divide between Republicans and Democrats metastasized, to the point where, as Nathan Kalmoe of Louisiana State University and Lilliana Mason of the University of Maryland found in their study on Lethal Mass Partisanship, “40-60% [of partisans] hold views that rationalize harming opponents” and “5-15% report feeling partisan schadenfreude or endorse partisan violence” (schadenfreude, for example, includes “Democrats feeling less concerned and more pleased about minor physical harm to President George W. Bush after a bicycle accident”).  

According to Kalmoe and Mason, virtually half of all current partisans hold attitudes that include “vilification and dehumanization of targets, blaming targets and emphasizing their deservingness for punishment, holding morally righteous views of oneself or one’s group, displacement of personal or collective responsibility for harm done, and minimizing or misrepresenting the extent of those harms.”

Their findings show that roughly 60-70% of both Republicans and Democrats agree with the notion that the other party is “a serious threat to the United States and its people.” Worryingly, 15% of Republicans and 20% of Democrats “agreed that the country would be better off if large numbers of opposing partisans in the public today ‘just died.” As the authors of the study remark, this is “a shockingly brutal sentiment.”

The extremes of this trend can be seen clearly in the “Trump 2020: Fuck Your Feelings” campaign rhetoric of 2020 and in the partisan violence that erupted during the insurrection of January 6th. 

In today’s 117th Congress, Democrats hold a slim majority of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, 221-211 (with three vacancies). The Senate, meanwhile, is divided evenly between 48 Democrats and 50 Republicans, with the nation’s two independent senators, Angus King of Maine and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, caucusing with the Democrats. Vice-President Harris’ tie-breaking vote determines control of the chamber, which puts the Democrats in charge of the floor.

Two weeks ago, the House approved a $1.9 trillion COVID relief package by a vote of 219-212, “with every Republican voting against the measure and just two Democrats joining them — Jared Golden of Maine and Kurt Schrader of Oregon.” On Friday, after a chaotic week of legislative infighting between progressive and “centrist” (re: conservative) Democratic senators, the Senate Democrats passed their own version of the package by a vote of 50-49 (the missing Republican vote needed to attend a funeral). This means that one of the largest bills in Congressional history, a bill that spends $1.9 trillion on the American people and their states, passed without a single vote from the minority party.

Unfortunately, President Biden made bipartisanship one of his defining campaign promises — not just in the general election against former President Trump, but also in the primaries, where he claimed his relationships with Republicans in the Senate would make his agenda more passable than “the political revolution” promised by Senator Sanders. Now Republicans are using the strict party-line vote on COVID relief to claim that President Biden has broken his promise to the American people.

However, as Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told a reporter last week, bipartisanship doesn’t mean working with Republican Senators and Representatives who refuse to accept the legitimacy of the President. Instead, it means passing legislation that is supported by the vast majority of Americans, and according to polls, 62% of voters, including almost half of all Republicans, support the Democrats’ COVID relief bill, preferring its swift passage over Democratic coöperation with Congressional Republicans.

Representative Jayapal is absolutely correct. The hyper-partisanship that governs the Republican primary system and the base’s continued allegiance to former President Trump all but ensures that McConnell-style obstructionists will rise to the top of the G.O.P. As in 2010, these individuals would rather play naked power-politics than actually engage with their fellow citizens on solving any of America’s problems. 

Despite not winning a single Republican vote on what is sure to be one of his administration’s major legislative victories, the President doubled down on his desire for bipartisanship. “There’s a lot of Republicans who came very close [to voting for the bill],” he told reporters. “They’ve got a lot of pressure on them. I still haven’t given up on getting their support.”

But as we saw with the elimination of the minimum-wage increase in the COVID Relief bill, bridging the gap between progressive and centrist Democrats is hard enough without also courting the votes of the reality-challenged insurrectionists of the Republican caucus.

While Republican officials continue to take the obstructionist path in an attempt pacify the fury of their Trump-supporting base, Americans of all stripes support a myriad of proposals for change, including:

The President should stop paying lip service to “official” bipartisanship and push for policies supported by the vast majority of Americans. It’s the only way to move the country forward.

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life politics reviews

On Liquid Democracy & Realistically Hopeful Insights into Vermont’s Future

I’m currently reading a book titled Liquid Reign. While terribly written on a sentence-by-sentence level (c’mon, man! stick with a consistent tense!), its non-dystopian/non-utopian vision of a future run on liquid democracy and the blockchain is one of the most inspiring books I’ve read. The intelligence, humor, and cultural preferences of the author shine through the text, as does his clear-eyed, evidence-based understanding of the negative impacts of his vision. I also love how at the end of each chapter he links the reader to whatever inspired the concepts he introduces or explores. Finally, I love that the author published the novel using a Creative Commons license, living up to the novel’s obvious ethic.

In case you’ve never heard of it (as I hadn’t just a few weeks ago), liquid democracy is the radical idea that you should be in charge of your vote.

In the most idealistic version of American democracy, every two years, you are allowed to select from among your neighbors an individual to travel to Washington D.C. to represent your and/or your community’s interests. On every question that comes before the American people for the next two years, you delegate your vote to this representative.

Additionally, every four years, you have the opportunity to influence the selection of the nation’s chief executive. Your influence is minimal though not insignificant (depending on which state you live in), and it allows you to breathe at least some of your preferences into the spirit of our nation’s laws.

Finally, every six years, your entire state receives the opportunity to delegate its vote on every question to one individual who lives in your state but whom you’ve probably never met and who almost certainly will never know your name.

When you’ve delegated your vote on every question to three individuals, two of whom you’ve probably never met and the last of whom you probably barely know, why would you believe you live in a democracy?

To be fair, direct democracy is difficult in small societies and untenable in large ones. We cannot expect every voter to be legitimately informed on every question (of course, when the United States Congress is passing 5,000+ page bills less than 24 hours after they’ve been released, we obviously don’t expect our well-paid, professional representatives to be legitimately informed either).

But a liquid democracy provides voters with the opportunity to vote directly (and participate directly) on every question that sparks their interest or to delegate their vote to whomever they like on any topic or question for which they don’t have the time, knowledge, expertise, or interest.

A quick example. While I care a lot about the corruptive effects of money on our democracy, I don’t have enough understanding of the nuances involved to vote on the low-level regulations necessary to counteract it. However, I’ve listened to enough speeches and read enough articles by Lawrence Lessig to know I trust him on the issue. Instead of directly participating in any of the many decisions necessary to enact meaningful anticorruption laws, I could delegate all my votes on the topic to him.

If, in turn, Mr. Lessig knew someone he trusted more than himself on the issue, he could delegate my vote and his vote and any other vote he controls on the issue to that more trustworthy person. I would be notified of the change and would be able to decide whether to keep my vote with that new person or take it back for myself.

And I could do something similar on virtually every decision that needs to be made in our democracy.

Additionally, because I can retract my vote from my delegates at any time, there is no more election cycle. Delegates must continue to prove their worthiness to carry my vote, and the minute they lose my faith or someone else impresses me more, I can change who represents me.

The idea is so powerfully simple that it seems like a no-brainer, with the only questions being ones of implementation. How private is a person’s vote? How does the system stay informed as to who is delegated by whom and on what range of issues? How does a voter know when their delegate has cast their vote? What issues are available to vote on? Etc.

The book answers most of its implementation questions with “the blockchain,” but not in a way that means “magic.” When it comes to blockchain technology and its potential over the next several decades, the author seems to know what he’s talking about, and he’s nerdy enough to include most of it in his plot, characterization, and dialogue.

I, however, cannot distinguish this sufficiently advanced technology from magic, and so were you to ask me, I’d simply say, “the blockchain.”

One thing that excites me about the book is the level of research and insight it demonstrates. It must have been so fun for the author to look deeply into a wide variety of technological possibilities and threats (not just blockchain, but virtual reality, artificial intelligence, green transportation, resilient communities, and so much more), combine them with a deep knowledge of alternative political and economical models (such as anarchism, socialism, liquid democracy, the military-industrial complex, etc.) and a fun sense of oracality for cultural and social movements to provide a deeply realistic vision of the future, one where the worst of us still lives and thrives among the best of us.

I’d like to do something similar, but concentrate my efforts on my local community. I’ve written an experimental novel that attempts to imagine an alternative future for my state, but it was (and was intended to be) wholly divorced from reality. In its second chapter, it introduces an eight-year-old girl with “a third eye in the middle of her forehead, [a] persimmon-irised, ebony-eyeballed third eye in the middle of the child’s pale, white forehead.” From that moment on, everything I wrote in the book said “Fuck it” to reality (or in the language of the novel, “skrinkle lee”).

I’d like to try again — not to write another novel on the secession of Vermont, but to envision a non-fantasy-based, evidence-riven, activist-driven, hopeful future for my community.

In 2005, our local environmental guru, Bill McKibben, penned a book entitled, Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America’s Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont’s Champlain Valley and New York’s Adirondacks. The book is based on a long, multi-day walk that McKibben takes from his home in the heart of the Green Mountains to another home he owns in the heart of the Adirondacks. Along the way, he visits with and tells the story of a number of entrepreneurs and activists who call the valley between them home, and he uses what he learns to suggest a reality-based vision of what’s possible.

Meanwhile, for the past 10 years, I’ve been actively working with young people who live at the southern end of McKibben’s same valley, people whose daily lives are filled with trauma and struggle and who can hardly lift their head high enough to hope for something better.

I want to help these people connect with the resources they need to participate in the hopeful future McKibben so beautifully writes about. I want to research the wide variety of ways our local entrepreneurs, educators, and activists can help individuals who are struggling cross the gap between what is and what can be, and like the author of Liquid Reign, I want to use my skills for research and writing to do it.

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politics

A Layperson’s Guide to H.R. 1

On Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 1, also known as the For the People Act of 2021. The bill aims “to expand Americans’ access to the ballot box, reduce the influence of big money in politics, strengthen ethics rules for public servants, and implement other anti-corruption measures for the purpose of fortifying our democracy, and for other purposes.”

This is a monumental bill, but it has little hope of passing the Senate, thanks to their insistence that our democracy bow to the will of the minority; however, if enough Americans push their Senators to support the wisdom of the bill, maybe, perhaps, a supermajority will win out.

To that end, here’s a detailed summary of what the For The People Act will do.

Voting & Elections

It requires states and/or local governments to build websites where individuals can register to vote, and for individuals who do not have access to the Internet, an automated-telephone system that allows them to register.

It mandates that states create an automatic voter-registration system that defaults to registering any eligible voter who is identified by a state-run system (e.g., if the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles has enough information to prove a person is eligible, then the state must register that person to vote, even if the person didn’t request it). Under this automated system, eligible voters must opt out of being registered, rather than opt in. Thankfully, the bill protects individuals from being held accountable if the automated system makes any errors on their behalf.

It authorizes $500 million to be appropriated from the Federal coffers to help states implement the above mandates. 

It mandates that states allow same-day voter registration at each polling place. 

It protects registered voters from being removed from a state’s voter rolls incorrectly, and it requires any de-registrations to occur no later than six months prior to the next election, allowing voters ample time to correct the record.

It mandates that each state provide a wide variety of voter-registration statistics to Congress in the first quarter of each year to ensure that each state continues to promote its voter registration efforts.

It authorizes $25 million to be granted to states that encourage their minors to participate in public-election activities, including (but not limited to) expanding their use of the pre-registration process and modifying high-school curriculums to promote civic engagement. 

It prohibits individuals from corrupting or hindering the voter registration process or from corrupting or hindering any individual who is trying to aid another in the process.

It requires states to allow individuals who are older than 16 but younger than 18 to register to vote. While the bill does not give 16 year olds the right to vote, it does expand voter registration efforts while also making it easier to expand the franchise in the future.

It mandates that states allow individuals with disabilities to vote by absentee ballot and to deliver absentee ballots to those individuals by default.

It prevents states from removing voters from the rolls using “voter caging lists.”

It prevents anyone from formally challenging an individual’s right to vote, unless the challenger has personal knowledge of the voters ineligibility and their claim is supported by written documentation. The challenger has to be willing to make their challenge under the penalty of perjury. If it is election day, it prohibits anyone other than a state official from making the challenge.

It makes it illegal to lie about someone else’s endorsement of a candidate, and it instructs the Attorney General to submit a yearly report of all allegations of deceptive practices to Congress and the public.

It restores voting rights to all individuals who have been convicted of a criminal offense but who are no longer serving a felony sentence in a correctional institution. 

It requires that all states use an “individual,  durable, voter-verified paper ballot” that counts as the official ballot in cases of recounts or audits. It mandates the paper ballots be counted by hand during recounts and audits, and that the paper ballots supersede any electronic vote tally as “the true and correct record” of the vote. It also requires stipulations for individuals with disabilities to ensure those who are blind or who don’t have the manual dexterity to make their mark have equal access to a “durable” ballot. Finally, it provides $5 million in grants for the development of technological systems that assist in this effort.

It extends protections to the handling of provisional ballots.

It mandates that all states allow early voting: States must accept ballots at least 15 days before the election. It also ensures that early-voting polling places stay open for at least ten hours a day during those 15 (or more) days, and that at least some of those hours are before 9am and after 5pm.

It mandates that all early-voting polling places be within walking distance of a stop on a public transportation route or (for rural areas) in communities that provide the greatest access.

It reduces impediments to voting by mail by forbidding states from imposing any conditions on the eligibility requirements for absentee ballots: if a registered voter requests a mail-in ballot, they get a mail-in ballot — end of story. Furthermore, if a voter requests a mail-in ballot, the state must assume they will always want a mail-in ballot, which effectively legalizes mail-in voting for all future elections. States must also develop websites and automated telephone systems to allow the requests to be made at a distance. Finally, it mandates that each state allow a wide variety of ways for the absentee ballot to make its way back to election officials, including through volunteer-driven ballot-harvesting operations. 

It provides special instructions to protect the right of military personnel and overseas citizens to vote, as well as the rights of their family members back stateside.

It forbids states from forcing mail-in voters to pay for postage.

It provides grants to states for poll-worker recruitment and training, pegging the amount of the grant to each state’s percentage of the nation’s voting-age population.

It prohibits “chief state election administration officials” from taking an active part in any political campaign affected by a Federal election (e.g., the Secretary of State of Florida would no longer be allowed to concurrently serve as the co-chair of a presidential candidate’s statewide election effort).

It mandates that institutions of higher education designate a “Campus Vote Coordinator” who will notify students of the location of polling places, explain various methods for getting to those locations, and provides links to voter-registration websites. It requires participation in the automatic voter-registration system for any educational institution that, in its normal course of operations, affirms a student’s citizenship. It also creates grants for institutions that can demonstrate excellence in their voter registration efforts.

It sets up minimum notification-requirements to ensure states give a voter whose polling place has changed enough time and opportunity to make a plan.

It requires states with voter ID laws to accept, for purposes of registration and voting, “a sworn written statement, under the penalty of perjury,” attesting to the voter’s identity and their ability to vote in the election. It also requires states to provide a pre-printed version of the statement at each polling place for use by any voter.

It provides accommodations to voters residing in Indian lands by relaxing controls around ballot pickup and collection locations and requiring multilingual voting materials.

It establishes a national toll-free hotline where concerned and aggrieved voters can receive answers to their state-based questions, file complaints against officials, or report intimidation tactics or any other information to the Attorney General about any problems they faced while voting or registering to vote.

It requires each state provide a sufficient number of voting systems, poll workers, and other election resources to ensure that no individual waits longer than 30 minutes to cast their ballot.

It protects the right of voters who have arrived at a polling place before it closes to cast their vote.

It ensures that all polling places in a state keep the same hours, give or take two hours. 

It requires that every county in every states provide “in-person, secured, and clearly labeled drop boxes” at which individuals may drop off an absentee ballot at least 45 days before the date of an election and up to the time the polls close on election day. It mandates that counties include at least one drop box for every 20,000 registered voters and station the boxes where they are the most accessible.

It protects the right of individual jurisdictions to allow curbside voting and prohibits states from imposing any restrictions on an individual in that jurisdiction from casting a ballot by such method — if one voter in a jurisdiction can curbside vote, then all voters in a jurisdiction can curbside vote.

It require states to develop contingency plans for holding elections during a state of  emergency, a public health emergency, or a national emergency, especially in the cases of natural disasters or infectious diseases.

It makes the Federal Election Assistance Commission permanent and removes the limit on its budget.

It expands voting protections to the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.

Election Integrity

It commits Congress to finding a way to restore the protections in the Voting Rights Act of 1964 that were gutted in 2013 by the Supreme Court.

It reconfirms Congress’ desire to admit the State of Washington, D.C. to the United States and to shrink the seat of the Federal government to the Capitol, White House, Supreme Court, the National Mall, and the other principal Federal monuments and buildings.

It creates a Congressional task force aimed at providing full and equal voting rights to the residents of U.S. territories, including voting rights in Congress.

It federalizes control of the redistricting process under Title 1, Sec. 4 of the U.S. Constitution and under the 14th Amendment, and mandates that each state create and follow the plan of an independent redistricting commission, which it also provides the guidelines for. For some reason, Iowa alone is exempt.

It creates ethical guidelines determining who can and cannot sit on an independent redistricting commission.

It provides protections for ethnic, racial and language minorities in the redistricting process and forbids the favoring or disfavoring of political parties. 

It requires the entire redistricting process be transparent and subject to public input and comment. The commission’s final vote approving the plan must also be held in public.

It empowers a three-judge panel to develop a redistricting plan if a state’s legislature fails to act on the commission’s plan.

It gives states $150,000 per Representative to which the state is entitled to fund the independent redistricting commission, excluding states (such as mine) that only get one member. 

It prevents a state from removing the name of any registered voter from the official list of voters unless the state verifies, on the basis of objective and reliable evidence, that the resident is ineligible to vote.

Election Security

It appropriates $1 billion from the Federal coffers in 2021 (and $175 million for each election year between 2021 and 2028) to provide grants to the states to increase election security measures, especially as it relates to voting machines and cybersecurity, with all kinds of stipulations around what the states need to do to qualify for the grants.

It makes the Secretary of the Homeland Security a member of the Board of Advisors of the Election Assistance Commission.

It appropriates $20 million a year for the years 2021-2029 to fund the research and development of election security technology through grants to higher-education institutions (include historically Black colleges and universities), non-profits, and for-profit organizations, associations, and companies, including small businesses. 

It compels the Department of Homeland Security to provide timely threat information regarding elections to chief state election officials, and allows state election officials to receive a security risk and vulnerability assessment from Homeland Security.

It requires the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence to submit a joint report to Congress on foreign threats to elections in the United States.

It mandates the Executive branch create a national strategy and implementation plan to protect democratic institutions “against cyber attacks, influence operations, disinformation campaigns, and other activities,” and creates a commission in the Legislative branch empowered to conduct hearings and investigations in an effort to strengthen those protections.

It strengthens the certification process of election hardware and software by requiring the machines and the software to be tested no later than nine months before every general election.

It requires chief State election officials to submit a report no later than 120 days before a general election detailing the state’s plan for voting system usage.

It creates an “Election Security Bug Bounty Program” that is voluntary to the states and which will reward individuals and organizations for finding bugs in the state’s elections security efforts.

It mandates that all voting machines used in a Federal election be manufactured in the United States.

Campaign Finance

It requires members of political committees and campaigns to notify the FBI of any reportable foreign contacts within one week of making the contact and a summary of the circumstances with respect to the contact, and creates a penalty of not more than $500,000 or not longer than five years in prison for anyone who violates the requirement, and up to $1 million for anyone who conceals or destroys evidence of the contact.

It closes loopholes that have allowed foreign nationals to spend money on U.S. elections, including through PACs and Super-PACs.

It prevents Corporate PACs from allowing a foreign national be a decision-maker in regards to the use of the fund.

It requires an audit after each Federal election to determine the influence of illicit foreign money in each election cycle.

It prohibits contributions and donations by foreign nationals in connection with ballot initiatives and referendums.

It makes it illegal for individuals and entities to establish corporations for the purpose of concealing election contributions and donations by foreign nationals.

It sets up transparent reporting rules for any corporate donations above $1,000.

It provides rules for judicial review of campaign finance laws.

It mandates transparency around the source of funding for any political ad, expands coverage of transparency regulations to modern technologies (i.e., online ads, satellite networks, etc.), and forces the ad or communication to make the statement “in a clear and conspicuous manner.”

It creates a public, online repository of every request to purchase a qualified political advertisement online made by a person whose total requests exceed $500, and it mandates that any online platform that exceeds 50 million unique American visitors per month report political-advertising purchase requests to the public repository.

It requires television, radio, satellite, cable and online platform companies take reasonable efforts to ensure that foreign nationals do not purchase political ads on their platform.

It mandates a report from the Federal Election Commission on the media literacy of Americans, particularly as it relates the consumption of online political content by voting-age Americans. 

It requires the creators of political advertising to stand by their message by conspicuously revealing either the individual who created the ad or the top five funders of the organization that created the ad (in case of radio ads, the top two funders). This is basically a strengthening of the of “I am [blank] and I approve this message” regulations. It also extends the regulations to include prerecorded telephone calls.

It forbids campaigns from sharing nonpublic campaign information with foreign nationals, including sharing that information with a non-campaign-affiliated U.S. citizen who, in turn, will share it with a foreign national.

It makes any foreign national who attempts to interfere with an election deportable from or and/or inadmissible to the U.S.

It mandates that the F.E.C. notify a state if it determines a foreign national is engaging or has engaged in a disinformation campaign in that state.

It prohibits the use of “deep fakes” and other media manipulation techniques in election campaigns.

It requires the Comptroller General to assess the implications of exemptions under the Foreign Agents Registration Act and the Lobbying Disclosure Act and how revisions to those acts might reduce the influence of foreign government money on elections and the political process.

It requires shareholders of any entity on a national securities exchange to register their preferences for the disbursement of the entity’s funds on behalf of a political campaign (i.e., any political donations from publicly-held entity must be in accordance with its shareholders’ wishes).

It regulates the financing of inauguration committees to prevent corporations and foreign nationals from donating to them, to make public any donor whose donation exceeds $1,000, and regulates the conversion of inauguration funds for personal use.

It makes some bold statements about the Supreme Court’s “misinterpretation of the Constitution” as it relates to the Court’s Citizens United decision, and calls for a Constitutional amendment that will allow Congress and the states to regulate campaign financing methods and prevent artificial entities such as corporations “from spending money to influence elections.”

It creates a pilot program that will provide $25 (in increments of $5 vouchers) to voting-age individuals in three states who can use the voucher to donate to qualified candidates for election to the House of Representatives. It also requires the beneficiary states to submit a report to the F.E.C. about the operation and effectiveness of the program.

It creates a public-financing source — the “Freedom from Influence Fund” — for Congressional elections that provides funds equal to 600% of the candidate’s small-dollar contributions (contributions of less than $200). This will allow candidates who are not wealthy or not connected to a network of wealthy individuals to be financially competitive during an election cycle. It also requires candidates who received money from the Freedom from Influence Fund to amass over 1,000 individual contributions and raise over $50,000 before they can qualify for the fund. It also limits candidates from using over $50,000 of their personal money if they elect to go the public-financing route. Finally, it prohibits candidates from retaining any unspent funds following the elections. 

It increases the public funds made available to candidates for presidential elections to 600% of the candidate’s small-dollar contributions.

It allows candidates from minor and new parties — i.e., parties other than the Democratic or Republican Parties — to receive the same publicly-funded, 600% match of their small-dollar donations up to $250 million.

It allows candidates to use public funds for some personal uses (specifically, childcare, elder care, and similar services, as well as to cover health insurance premiums) in order to help “ordinary Americans” run for office.

It makes it easier for political parties to support candidates through coordinated small-dollar donation funds. 

It reduces the membership of the F.E.C. to five and limits the party-affiliation of the members to no more than two members per party. It also restructures the commission’s voting process to allow a simple majority to rule, prohibits members from being engaged with or employed by any other business during their service, and adjusts a number of rules governing the commission. 

It stops Super PACs and candidates from coordinating their efforts, and treats coordinating efforts as political donations, with all the regulations thereof.

It requires campaigns to file various reports with the F.E.C. before an election takes place so that voters have all the information they need to make an informed vote.

Ethics

It mandates the creation of a code of conduct for Federal judges.

It requires the Attorney General to create a unit within the counterespionage section of the Department of Justice to enforce the regulations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, and gives the unit a budget of $10 million a year.

It ensures government officials disclose anything of financial value that was given to them by a foreign agent, including favorable regulatory treatment or anything that provides an indirect financial benefit.

It mandates the creation of a publicly accessible electronic database of the above disclosures.

It expands the scope of individuals and activities subject to the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995. Individuals who provide counseling services are now subject to the act. It also reduces the threshold the determines when individuals have to register as lobbyists. 

It prohibits individuals who receive compensation for lobbying activity from lobbying on behalf of foreign governments who engage in gross violations of human rights, as determined by the President.

It requires lobbyists to identify themselves as lobbyists whenever they make contact with an official from the executive or legislative branch, and they must identify the client on whose behalf the contact is made.

It forces officials or employees appointed by the President to recuse themselves from any matter in which a party to that matter is the President, the President’s spouse, and/or an entity in which the President has a substantial interest.

It establishes a clearinghouse in the Department of Justice through which members of the public can search and sort registration information related to the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 and the Foreign Agent Registration Act of 1938.

It cleans up restrictions on private sector payments to members of the Executive branch.

It slows the revolving door between the private sector and government officials and prohibits government officials from participating in matters concerning their former employers or clients.

It forbids government procurement officers from accepting employment with government contractors or subcontractors, divisions, or affiliates of a government contractor for at least two years after they leave government service. It requires procurement officers to also disclose any job offers made to their relatives. Finally, it forbids procurement officers from participating in awarding a contract to a former employer for at least two years after they left the employer. 

It extends restrictions on the lobbying efforts of former senior officials from one year to two years.

It requires the Director of the Office of Government Ethics to issue guidance on ethical standards applicable to unpaid employees in the Executive Office of the President and the White House.

It prohibits federal funds from being used to procure goods or services from any business that is owned or controlled by certain government officials or their family members. The government officials include the President, Vice-President, the head of any Executive department, or an individual occupying a Cabinet-level position.

It requires Presidents and Vice Presidents to divest of all financial interests that pose a conflict of interest within 30 days of taking office and to place all of those finances in a blind trust. It also requires Presidents and Vice Presidents to disclose the names of their business partners and the value, identity, and category of each asset and liability with a value of $10,000 or more.

It forbids officials from receiving funds for the payment or reimbursement of legal fees or expenses except through a legal defense fund that has been certified by the Director of the Office of Government Ethics. It also ensures that the legal defense fund receives its monies from more than one person and forbids lobbyists, foreign agents and governments, state governments and agents, anyone who has business with the official’s agency, or anyone in the Executive branch from contributing to the fund.

It tightens ethical regulations within the White House, strengthens the job security of the Director of the Office of Government Ethics, and provides instructions on ethical training procedures and compliance for government officials.

It forbids Federal funds from being used for improper travel expenses, and requires a report to be filed every 90 days detailing the direct and indirect costs of Presidential travel, the travel of the President’s immediate family members, and the travel of senior-level officials.

It cleans up rules regulating conflicts from political fundraising.

It improves transparency and ethical guidelines for Presidential Transition Teams.

It forces all appointees in an executive agency to sign an ethics pledge that clarifies the various ethical requirements that the American people expect them to live up to during their tenure, under penalty of law.

It prohibits federal officials from using federal funds to travel on a non-commercial, private, or chartered flight.

It requires member of Congress to reimburse the Federal treasury for any settlements or awards made under the Congressional Accountability Act of 1995 in all cases of employment discrimination.

It prohibits members of the House of Representatives from serving on the boards of for-profit entities.

It forbids employees in the Legislative branch from using their position to further their pecuniary interests or the interests of their family members.

It forces campaigns to disclose to the F.E.C. if any of their senior officials are registered lobbyists.

It requires the creation of an online portal where members of the public can access (for free) electronic copies of every congressionally mandated report, except those that are exempt from public disclosure and with any necessary redactions completed.

It mandates reports by the Senate and House Ethics Committees on any outside compensation earned by Congressional employees.

It requires every Presidential and Vice Presidential candidate from a major party to submit their 10 most recent tax returns to the F.E.C. within 15 days of receiving the nomination of their party, and to continue to release their tax returns while serving their term. It also forces the F.E.C. to make those returns public.

Conclusion

As you can see from 116 items above, nothing in this act benefits candidates from one party over another, and each items deserves to be made the law of the land. I urge you to contact your Senators to encourage their support of the For The People Act of 2021. 

Categories
politics

Looking Backward & Forward on American Healthcare

In his State of the Union address in 1944, President Roosevelt suggested a second, economic-based Bill of Rights because his generation, which was still in the middle of World War II, came “to a clear realization…that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence [and that] people who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”

Among other rights, President Roosevelt’s address proposed for every American citizen “a right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.”

President Roosevelt wasn’t the first to call for an American right to healthcare.

His fifth-cousin, former President Theodore Roosevelt, made affordable health insurance a key plank in the agenda of his Progressive Party. In his Confession of Faith speech from 1912, given four years after his second term ended, former President Roosevelt called for “industries, the employer, the employee, and perhaps the people at large to contribute” to the insurance pool. Though Roosevelt did not call for the recognition of a new American right, he did recognize the unfairness “for any industry to throw back upon the community the human wreckage due to its wear and tear.”

In 1915, the American Association for Labor Legislation called for subsidized healthcare for low-income workers, but opposition from the American Medical Association and a little thing called World War I prevented it from making much headway (opponents at the time characterized the proposal as “a Prussian menace”).

In the 1930s, President Roosevelt’s Committee on Economic Security considered adding government-funded healthcare to the New Deal, but the American Medical Association’s opposition prevented it from being included in the Social Security Act of 1935. Despite the opposition, President Roosevelt continued to stump for the policy, as did his Surgeon General, who argued “equal opportunity for health is a basic American right.”

At the end of the 1930s, a New York Senator proposed  the National Health Care Act of 1939, which “created federal funding to states for expanding public health, maternal and child health services, medical care for the low-income, short-term disability insurance, hospital construction, and prepaid medical insurance,” but the onset of World War II distracted Congress from ever taking it up.

In the 1940s and 50s, various versions of the Wagner-Murray-Dingell Bill proposed compulsory health insurance for every American, paid for through payroll taxes. After President Roosevelt died in office without Congress having taken up his call, his successor, President Harry Truman, came out in support of the bill, but with anti-socialist Republicans in control of Congress, the proposals died before they got a chance to breathe.

Congress wouldn’t seriously address healthcare for another two decades, when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Social Security Amendments of 1965 to create the Medicare program, which aimed “to provide a hospital insurance program for the aged…with a supplementary medical benefits program and an extended program of medical assistance.” With this bill, President Johnson and the 89th Congress created a universal health insurance program for every American over the age of 65.

President Richard Nixon tried to reduce government involvement, proposing a Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan that would force employers to carry the burden of health insurance for most Americans, while also providing assistance to low-income individuals and improving Medicare. Unfortunately, President Nixon’s crimes in the Watergate scandal put an end to his legislative agenda.

His elected successor, President Jimmy Carter, abandoned his earlier call for mandatory, universal coverage, disappointing his ally, Senator Ted Kennedy. Instead of trying to expand coverage, President Carter fixated on reducing the cost of healthcare as part of his focus on reducing inflation. He later wrote that “for most of my term, I fought the hospital and medical lobbyists, trying to initiate hospital-cost containment measures designed to insure adequate health care at a reasonable expense…I was never able to succeed in this effort…In the final showdown, Congress was flooded with money, in the form of campaign contributions from the health industry.”

President Ronald Reagan took a different route on healthcare. He’d long been an opponent to federally-funded healthcare. In 1961, he released a 10-minute long speech on LP titled, “Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine,” which (of course) was secretly paid for by the American Medical Association. Twenty years later, the AMA’s spokesperson became president, and the Reagan Administration slashed federal funding for healthcare. His budgets cut Medicaid funding by 18%, reduced the budget of the Department of Health and Human Services by 25% (eliminating a number of healthcare programs in the process), and  cut funding for maternal and children’s health by 18%.

The hits continued. Under the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, “a million children lost reduced-price school lunches, 600,000 people lost Medicaid, and a million lost food stamps…Nearly 500,000 lost eligibility for Aid to Families with Dependent Children…More than 250 community health centers were closed. Between 1980 and 1991, 309 rural hospitals and 294 urban hospitals were shuttered. Nearly one million Native Americans lost access to Indian Health Service care when eligibility was narrowed…Unintended pregnancy rates increased by nearly 8 percent…Life-expectancy-at-birth of black Americans decreased…By 1988, the Institute of Medicine declared that the American public health system had fallen into disarray.”

President George H.W. Bush didn’t care about healthcare. According to what his staff members told a healthcare writer, the president was “bored silly” by domestic policies and his healthcare proposals in the election of 1992 were only offered as a sop to voters — “he was a fish out of water on health care from start to finish.”

After defeating the incumbent (partly due to the healthcare issue), President Bill Clinton made universal healthcare the number one priority of his administration, and in an unprecedented step, he appointed his wife, then First Lady Hillary Clinton, to oversee a task force to make it happen. The result was a 1,000+ page proposal called the Health Security Act, which wasn’t universal healthcare, but was a suite of complex health insurance plans aimed at providing a comprehensive benefits package to all citizens, permanent aliens, and long-term nonimmigrants (e.g., foreign diplomats). Famously, the Clinton effort failed.

President George W. Bush reversed some of the Reagan-era reductions in healthcare-related federal spending. He took strong steps to curtail HIV/AIDS on a global scale. His administration’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief was “the largest commitment by any nation to combat a single disease in human history.” His administration also took on diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis around the world.

For Americans, he expanded prescription drug benefits under Medicare, giving the program its largest expansion in decades (though denying the program the right to negotiate en bloc). According to an editorial in The New York Times published in the days before he left office, the plan was responsible for “reducing the percentage of older Americans who lack drug coverage, from 33% before the program started to only 8% in 2006.” He also doubled federal financing of community health centers.

But he focused less on ensuring the right of all Americans to quality healthcare and more on expanding the market’s influence on the industry. In 2003, Congress created Health Savings Accounts, high-deductible health plans that allow for tax-preferred treatment of medical expenses. HSAs were, as one of his advisors put it, “an opportunity for people…to have more skin in the game,”  but as one of his critics, Senator Ted Kennedy, said, “President Bush’s health savings accounts are a gimmick that will only make a bad situation worse.”

When President Barack Obama took over the White House in 2009, he followed President Clinton’s lead and made healthcare his first priority. After a bitter fight in Congress over what would be termed Obamacare, he signed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) into law. While the progressive goal of single-payer healthcare was abandoned during the drafting of the bill, President Obama tried to sidestep the failure by suggesting with its passage, “we finally declared that in America, health care is not a privilege for a few, but a right for all.”

Of course, we didn’t do that. Instead, with the passage of the ACA, which forces Americans to either buy health insurance or pay a penalty during tax season, we declared that the United States is committed to a private health-insurance industry regardless of the profit motive’s effects on the health of our citizens.

Despite saying his healthcare plan was perennially two-weeks away from being submitted to Congress, President Donald Trump failed to replace the Affordable Care Act with a federal plan of his own. While he did succeed in gutting the personal penalty from the ACA (reducing it to $0) and repealing “the Cadillac tax” on high-end plans, at the end of a hell-scape of an administration that saw the death of over 400,000 Americans due to a global pandemic, the ACA remains the law of the land.

We’re now less than three weeks into the administration of President Joe Biden, and every one of those days has seen over 2,500 Americans die from the pandemic. While it’s way too early to know what the Biden Administration will deliver for Americans, his campaign promised to “build on the Affordable Care Act by giving Americans more choice, reducing health care costs, and making our health care system less complex to navigate.”

President Biden’s commitment to the ACA will ensure that Americans will continue to suffer from a lack of universal, single-payer coverage for at least the next four years. During the campaign, President Biden doubled down on his opposition to “Medicare for All,” saying that if he was president when Senator Bernie Sanders’ bill reached the White House, he would veto a “single-payer, national health insurance program to provide everyone in America with comprehensive health care coverage, free at the point of service.”

The Way Forward

The American history of universal healthcare is long and complex, and many of the arguments focus on the technical difficulties of trying to provide quality, affordable care to a nation of roughly 300 million people without driving the nation or its people into perpetual debt.

But all of the focus on how to make it happens obfuscates the why. As a nation, we still have not fulfilled President Franklin Roosevelt’s promise; we still do not recognize that healthcare is a human right.

Until we take that first step, all the discussions about how universal healthcare will work or who it will work for or how it will be paid for are useless. They all assume that we have a choice, when the reality is that, if healthcare is a human right, we don’t. We just have to make it work

We don’t need a 1,000+ page document to make universal healthcare the law of the land. All we need is a single sentence enshrined in an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that declares healthcare is the right of every citizen.

We already have some decent options on how to formulate that right:

Regardless of its wording, once the right has been established, we’ll have changed the entire environment in which healthcare is delivered in this country. The federal government, doctors, nurses, medical schools, hospitals, community health centers, private insurance companies, all of them will have to adapt to the new reality. That process will continue to be long and complex, but they won’t have the choice of maintaining the status quo.

If we change the conditions around which they try to solve their problems, perhaps we’ll make it possible to actually solve those problems.

The way forward is not to get stuck in the muck of how to do universal healthcare (which, by the way, every other developed country has already figured out), but to enshrine the why in our U.S. Constitution.

Categories
politics

Inauguration Day, 2021

Today is supposed to be a good day. Former President Trump no longer wields a modicum of official power over the United States of America, and if enough Senators do their job correctly, he will be banned from holding power again. Former President Donald J. Trump will be shunned.

Today is supposed to be a good day. Senator Mitch McConnell has lost his grip on the economic, political, and moral progress of this country. He can still exercise tremendous influence as the Senate Minority Leader, but a single senator from Kentucky can no longer prevent the nation’s progress outright.

Today is supposed to be a good day. The President of the United States once again possesses the capacity for empathy. The Vice-President of the United States is once again capable of eating a meal with a person of the opposite sex without requiring her significant other to be in attendance. The overseers of our Federal bureaucracy once again recognize the challenges posed by climate change and (at the very least pay lip service to) the moral and fiscal imperatives those challenges engender.

Today is supposed to be a good day. Every employee in the executive branch is now free to admit that the citizens of the United States are suffering under the weight of a very real pandemic and that any immediate help the government can provide is already too late in coming and cannot delay a minute longer. Every employee in the executive branch can now be activated to address the real crises that stand before us rather than waste their time, effort, and resources trying to sustain the graces of their Dear Leader.

Today is supposed to be a good day. Transparency, honesty, and a commitment to sharing even the hardest of truths have found a home in front of our national press corps. The White House Press-Briefing Room is once again recognized as a national conference room where professional interrogators can question, criticize, and clarify the actions and decisions of our public servants without becoming villainized for exercising their rights as citizens of our free republic.

Today is supposed to be a good day. Cynicism, cronyism, and unfettered capitalism have been ushered out the door of the White House. A belief in the necessity of the regulatory state has resumed command of our national economic tools and stands ready to enforce our regulations with the might of the majority.

Today is supposed to be a good day. The legislative and executive branches of the Federal government belong to the nation’s popular majority. The Party representing that majority claims to believe that a democratic government belongs in the hands of the majority (charitably informed and voluntarily restrained by the observations and insights of any citizen who finds themself in the minority). Promising to remove all barriers between a voter and their vote, this melding of power, philosophy, and political principle ought to increase the influence of the people on the levers of our democracy.

Today is supposed to be a good day.

But I fear it may be too late.

Tomorrow the sun will rise. My daughter will come downstairs and show her love for our puppy. My wife and I will make breakfast, make lunch, kiss each other and our daughter and our puppy goodbye, and go off to work, where my wife and I will each come face to face with all of the children who are feeling the weight of this pandemic, the stress in their parents’ lives manifesting as lost patience, abusive hands and language, emotional and physical neglect, addiction, depression, divorce, trauma, and fear. We’ll continue to experience the day to day challenges every child faces thanks to a year of social and educational isolation; a year of uninterrupted (nay, parental and societally enforced) screentime; a year of missed funerals, weddings, birthdays, holidays — a year devoid of ritual. We’ll listen to the students who just need to vent, and we’ll try to engage with the students who have retreated inside themselves. We’ll encourage every burst of curiosity, try to add a spark to every moment of eye contact, and strive to create more significant moments than our tasks give us time for. We’ll use our knowledge and experience, and we’ll put in the work.

But still, that kid in the corner will break down into tears and there will be nothing we can do about it. That parent will pop that pill after swearing off their addiction and there will be nothing we can do about it. That grandmother will die because the hospital was too crowded for the doctor to get to her in time and there will be nothing we can do about it.

Today is supposed to be a good day. But tomorrow, the sun will rise, and the actions and decisions of President Donald J. Trump will still influence our reality. And there will be nothing we can do about it.