Assassination Not Acceptable in a Democracy

 All I can say is that it’s a good thing that Thomas Matthew Crooks was as incompetent as his target. Most important is that there is no place for violence in a democracy. A distant second is that I think a live Trump is easier for any Democrat to beat than any other Republican who could point to him as a “martyr”. While Trump eggs on his supporters/cult members to be prepared to use violence if he doesn’t win the election, any reasonable adult understands that violence just begets violence and everyone suffers.

The last time a president or presidential candidate was injured in an assassination attempt was when Ronald Reagan was shot John Hinckley, Jr. on March 30, 1981. At that time 3 others were seriously injured including Reagan’s press secretary James Brady. Brady was so severely injured that he was never able to return to work or walk again due to brain damage. After his recovery, Brady and his wife, Sarah, spent much of the next 12 years working with anti-gun violence advocacy groups and later running the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act enacted November 30, 1993 and signed by President Bill Clinton, it is often referred to as the Brady Bill or the Brady Act. The Brady Bill mandates federal background checks on firearm purchasers in the United States. The intention of the act was to prevent persons with previous serious criminal convictions from purchasing firearms.

Even though the promoters of the bill were Republicans, its passage was due to 3 times as many Democrats as Republicans voting in favor of the bill. Their own beloved president nearly being murdered wasn’t enough for Republicans to take action on reducing the availability of firearms, as they couldn’t see the value of greater care in limiting who could possess one.

Today with the Republican Party being so closely tied to the firearms industry I can’t see even the small fraction of their federal legislators who voted for controls on firearms in 1993 supporting any further efforts to prevent gun violence now. I realized a long time ago that a major difference between Republican and Democrats is that Republicans lack empathy for anyone not like them. Having reviewed the history of James and Sarah Brady’s efforts to pass their simple and reasonable bill I now realize that Republicans lack of empathy even applies to their own tribe, unless something awful happens to a member of their immediate family they simply can’t appreciate that suffering and therefore don’t care to takes steps to ameliorate or prevent that suffering. Of course they’ll pray for you, for all the good that does.

Last weekend’s violence is unacceptable, not just in the political arena. A former fire chief died protecting his family and two others were seriously injured by the shooter. No one should be able to perpetrate such a violent crime and cause the suffering of others.

Unlike the 6 Republican Supreme Court justices who just weeks ago threw out Trump’s own restrictions on the modification of semi-automatic rifles that allowed the shooter in Las Vegas in 2017 to murder 60 people at a single event, I don’t believe for a moment that the founders of this nation had any intention to enable such a calamity.

I hope that it doesn’t take another dozen years to pass legislation to stop the slaughter of Americans and make it stick. I have no hope at all that Republicans will be any help in accomplishing that unless a family member is murdered.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - July 17, 2024

Project 2025 - Plan for an Authoritarian State

 Donald Trump can deny knowledge of the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” all he likes but the fact that 16 of the 39 named authors of the 920 page document are former members of his administration should tell you something. Some of the more well known members of the group are Benjamin S. Carson, Sr., MD who was Trump’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Peter Navarro whom Trump appointed to the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, and Ken Cuccinelli who served Trump as Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security. It’s hard to imagine that with that many of his former appointees involved in a project he wouldn’t know something about it.

The reason “Project 2025”; officially titled “Mandate for Leadership, The Conservative Promise”, is important for every American to be aware of is that it is a plan for how the next Republican administration can gut our federal institutions and remake this nation into a authoritarian state.

In 1883 the Pendleton Civil Service Act was adopted, requiring government jobs to be awarded to individuals based upon merit and not political affiliation. The Pendleton Act also made it illegal to fire government workers solely for political reasons. Trump already tried to overturn the protections of this act in his first term but waited too long to implement it. “Project 2025” offers a plan far more thorough, going deeper into all federal agency structures to replace scientists, accountants, and other subject matter experts with people whose sole qualification for the job is loyalty to Trump.

President Nixon signed the Environmental Protection Act in 1970 and it has been improved upon over the decades such that we now have cleaner air and water than we did a century ago leading to healthier lives for all. The author of the “Project 2025” section on the Environmental Protection Agency suggests that Trump’s hand waving reclassification of High-Level nuclear waste to Low-Level is a great way to complete cleanup of various retired nuclear facilities and sites. This attitude toward safe disposal of nuclear waste carries over into all forms of hazardous waste site cleanup. Reclassification doesn’t magically render hazardous materials less hazardous it just allows inadequately processed dangerous materials to continue to threaten the health and well-being of anyone who ends up living or working near the site or the disposal location in the future.

“Project 2025” proposes abandoning efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change, including by repealing regulations that curb emissions, downsizing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and abolishing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). They want to abolish NOAA because the agency provides much of the data that enables scientists to track climate change and its effects.

“Project 2025” seeks to extend the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 and recommends simplifying individual income taxes to just two brackets, 15% and 30%, thus creating a nearly flat tax on wage income beyond the standard deduction. It aims to reduce the corporate tax rate to 18%, while suggesting setting taxes on capital gains and dividends at 15%. After these changes are implemented, it recommends that a three-fifths vote threshold be required to pass legislation that increases individual or corporate income tax, making it virtually impossible to ever change tax rates again. The Congressional Budget Office has reported that extending the 2017 tax cuts would increase the deficit by $4 trillion by 2028. You'll notice that Republicans only complain about the budget deficit when Democrats are in office even though it is Republicans who increase it the most.

There is much more that you should make yourself aware of.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - July 10, 2024

Biden Debate Results

 Many of us who watched the Presidential debate last week were disappointed in Joe Biden’s performance. Maybe that’s because he set such a high bar at the State of the Union address or at various venues during the primary. Those of us who want a Democrat in the White House wanted him to hit it out of the ballpark, but even great players have bad nights. Ask Barry Bonds who broke Hank Aaron’s Major League Baseball home run record.

Yes, Biden had a difficult night on stage and there was suddenly lots of fantasy talk that he should step down. You and I know what it’s like to have to go to work or take care of the family with a summer cold; we don’t have the energy to be cheerful and forceful. The reality is the people who most needed to be reached and convinced to vote for Biden, overwhelmingly saw through the lackluster energy and the verbal stumbling. Univision, the Spanish language television organization, hosted a focus group of independent and undecided Hispanic voters whom they interviewed after the debate. The previously undecided voters swung hard for Biden because they saw through the noise and recognized that Biden’s policies and aspirations were better for them than the vitriol and lies spewed by the convicted felon who opposed him.

Other news organizations found the same thing in their focus groups and the polls that checked in on voters after the debate showed similar results. Those who were previously undecided and watched the debate generally said they were more likely to vote for Biden than before the debate and less likely to vote for the former president.

If you still have anxiety over Biden’s debate performance check out his campaign event a day later, he’s far more energetic and forceful in his delivery.

I’m not sure that Trump made a single truthful statement the entire night other than perhaps when talking about his golf game. He most certainly lied about who thought it was a good idea to overturn Roe v. Wade and send abortion regulation back to the states. Trump lied about his purported success controlling the flow of undocumented immigrants, as such border crossings were higher during his administration’s 4 years in office than under former President Barack Obama’s 8 years.

If you go to the grocery you can’t have missed that grocery prices have gone up significantly over the last several years. My experience of around a 20% increase turns out to be about what the national statistics say grocery prices have increased which is a far cry from the tripling or quadrupling that Trump claimed. Heck, if Trump’s claim was true my monthly grocery bill would be significantly than my mortgage payment.

Trump is still making claims about election fraud in the 2020 election even though various state officials, including Republicans in Georgia, said the 2020 election was legitimate. Trump’s own attorney general, William Barr, said that he had not seen fraud on a scale that would invalidate Joe Biden’s victory. Those aren’t all the lies Trump told, just some of the highlights.

The most important reason to support Joe Biden is the same reason former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger has endorsed Biden despite his differences on policy. Kinzinger said “I’ve always put democracy and our Constitution above of all us. It’s because of my unwavering support for democracy that today, as a proud conservative, I’m endorsing Joe Biden for reelection.”

Published in the Seguin Gazette - July 3, 2024