To Everyone Voting Harris To “Save Democracy”
By Mitch Berg
And People can vote for whoever they want to. It’s still a fairly free country.
But I’ve had a few people in my circle say they’re voting for Harris and Walz to “save democracy”.
When I read that ,I try to grasp how much one must ignore – willfully or not – to believe that Harris and Walz [2] support the American republican (small-r) system of popular, federalist government.
How do I count the ways?
1. Harris wants to abolish the Filibuster.
So what, you say? The filibuster gets in the way of “Getting things done?”
That’s the point. Most of what makes America great is that unless there is *overwhelming* agreement about something, it’s either going to get watered down, or just go away.
And that’s a good thing – a 50%+1 vote majority can’t jam everything it wants down on the other 49%. Both sides are *accountable*, and both sides *matter*.
WIthout the filibuster, the US will turn into France or Greece – with policies seesawing back and forth with changes in power.
Getting rid of the filibuster destroys a key pillar of trying to run a country where people don’t necessarily always agree with, or even like, each other.
What do you suppose that gets replaced with?
2. Harris supports gutting the First Amendment.
Harris supports (and gained power in part via) big tech censoring dissent. She’s cozy with Big Tech, and she wants that to count:
Democrats across administrations keep floating the idea of having a cabinet-level “disinformation czar” – which is another way of saying “someone who make sure all the news fits the official narrative”:
Governor Walz, for his part, ran a snitch line, and signed into law a “thoughtime database”. There is no way for a citizen to get *into* the database or find out what’s in it.
It’s not just Harris, and it isn’t just statements from 2019:
It’s not just conservatives raising the alarm:
And let’s not forget that Big Media is very, very on board with putting the finger on the scales to get the results they want:
Which is, literally, a promise to disinform the public.
If a Republican had done anything of the sort, Democrats would be screaming about the “chilling effect on dissent and democracy” that is.
*And they’d be right*.
3. Harris supports gutting the 2nd and 4th Amendments.
Since you’ll ask – the 1st and 2nd Amendments *are* litmus tests to me. How someone treats your right to speak, your freedom of conscience, to organize, and to protect your life, family, property, community and freedom, tells you a lot about how they’d treat other civil rights.
And in this particular quote, Harris showed that she’s perfectly fine trashing the 4th Amendment right to privacy with it:
4. Harris wants to gut the separation of powers
My whole life, the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) has been left-of-center or (from about 2000 to 2017) pretty much deadlocked. Democrats were fine with that – “elections have consequences”. So we conservatives got some good SCOTUS appointments – and the Democrats are going crazy:
“[Harris] will also support common-sense Supreme Court reforms—like requiring Justices to comply with ethics rules that other federal judges are bound by and imposing term limits—to address the crisis of confidence facing the Supreme Court.”
And who’s going to enforce those rules and limits?
The executive branch.
The Supreme Court, which is supposed to check and balance the power of the Executive and Legislative branches, will become subordinate to the President; the executive branch will be able to yank the leash of any justice that displeases them.
If you don’t think that’s a direct attack on how “democracy” is run, I’d love to hear how.
As far as packing the court goes – do you really need to explain the effect this will have on respect for the institution?
5. Harris and Democrats are open to abolishing the Electoral College.
The Electoral College (EC), along with the structure of the Senate, was part of the agreement that smaller states – Delaware, Rhode Island, Vermont – made with the bigger ones (Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New York) to ensure that American “democracy” wouldn’t turn into the equivalent of “two foxes and a chicken voting on what’s for breakfast”.
Without the EC, the President will always be decided by California, New York, Pennsylvania, Florida, Texas and maybe Ohio. There will be no need for Presidential candidates to even show up outside those states.
And it’d violate the contract by which the smaller states agreed to share power with the Federal Government. And what happens when you violate a contract? [3]
6. And all of that is just about “protecting democracy itself”.
It doesn’t get into the many other reasons I could never support Harris or Walz.
They support:
– Open borders.
– A foreign policy that *enables and encourages* the likes of Xi, Putin and the Mullahs. Diplomacy only works if it’s combined with the sense that there’s a nasty surprise behind it. Harris – the “last person in the room” – has been involved in more Biden administration fiascoes than any human should be allowed to; the Afghan collapse, Ukraine (Biden publicly told Putin he could invade *just a little* [4]), and the conflagration in the MIddle East (hint: saying “Israel has a right to exist, BUT they need to give Hamas and Hezb’allah a cease fire so they can re-arm, reorganize and try to exterminate Jews again later is *not* a coherent policy).
(Trump, for all his flaws, brought more progress than the Middle East has seen since 1978. Harris and Biden are benefitting, btw, from that – the fact that the Saudis, Egyptians and Jordan aren’t joining in with Iran against the Israelis is something kind of new.)
And for all the palaver about Trump “disrespecting” NATO, it served its purpose – starting NATO on the path toward becoming a serious defensive military alliance, rather than yet another bureaucratic salon.
Look, Trump is far from perfect – I didn’t vote for him in 2016, and I remain a Trump skeptic on many levels. I can’t stand his personality cult (or any personality cult in politics).
But January 6 was a riot, and even the FBI has cleared Trump of any substantial involvement. His statements about the 2020 election were way out of line…
…BUT even if Trump *was* trying to undercut democracy, our federalist system *did its job*, exactly as designed. In the grand scheme of things, nothing Trump did (or was alleged to have done) affected the handover of power, or the functioning of our institutions.
But the things Harris is proposing [5]? They WOULD change how our democracy works. Very much for the worse. They are a bigger threat to American self-government than anything Trump did, and certainly more than anything he’s *seriously(* proposed doing [6].
Joy doesn’t keep the world safe. Brat vibes don’t put food on the table. The American federalist system is stronger than mean tweets.
So I’m voting for Trump – *to protect our democracy”.
(PS – I’m a relentlessly civil guy. But responding with one of those passive-aggressive “laugh” emojis is going to get you called out).
[1] But everyone else is doing it, so sue me. Not literally, of course. It’s still a free-ish country – Walz’s “thoughtcrime” database notwithstanding.
[2] When I say “Harris” or “Walz”, I’m also including plenty of prominent Democrats who are likely to be influential in any administration they run.
[3] “Haha, Merg. That was settled in 1865!”. Well, no. It was settled in 1776.
[4] The “Just the tip” of diplomacy – and as we’ve seen this past two years, it’s worked about as well on the world stage as it did after prom.
[5] Saying “That was 2019! She’s changed!” ain’t gonna cut it. She herself says “My principles haven’t changed”. And if you’re holding things Trump said in 2006, in completely different contexts, against him, we need to have a word about this.
[6] And if you come back and say “he SAID he wants to be a dictator on day one!”, that was yet another dishonest edit. He’s going to roll back a slew of Biden executive orders, and reinstate a few of his own – all legitimate Presidential duties. Getcher shinebox.
October 23rd, 2024 at 1:03 pm
Protecting our Democracy is so important, so to protect it the Dems would obviously want to send out their best and brightest candidates, right?
Instead they were willing to try to pass off a senile, doddering wreck who has to read a teleprompter to ask to the bathroom, and then a blithering idiot.
October 23rd, 2024 at 1:24 pm
“His statements about the 2020 election were way out of line…” – Mitch Berg
“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.” – Joe Klaas
I won’t rehash all the reasons I believe Trump was correct to point out that the 2020 election was stolen and that Democrats are trying their hardest to steal this one. If someone isn’t convinced by now, they won’t be. But those beliefs cause a fundamental difference in the way we view this election and these candidates, and explain why Democrats claiming we must defeat Trump to protect democracy is particularly risible.
October 23rd, 2024 at 1:36 pm
Right there with you, Mr Jones.
October 23rd, 2024 at 2:18 pm
Perhaps those are the best and brightest on the port side, NW.