* * *
Is the Tide Turning?
The turning of the tide against the
foes of democracy that is occurring in Wisconsin and Michigan where voters are
beginning to see the light is still the exception rather than the rule. The New
York Times story the other day on the Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice election
reports this good news.
"MILWAUKEE — The commanding victory on Tuesday by a liberal candidate in a pivotal race for the Wisconsin Supreme Court showed the enduring power of abortion rights and issues of democracy as motivators for Democratic voters, as well as a continuing struggle among conservatives to put forward candidates who can unite Republicans and win general elections.
The
liberal candidate, Janet Protasiewicz, swept onto the bench by 11 percentage points, a
staggering margin in an evenly divided battleground state that signaled just
how much last summer’s Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade has
transformed American politics.
The Wisconsin race centered squarely on abortion rights and political representation: Judge Protasiewicz all but promised voters that if they elected her, the court’s new 4-to-3 liberal majority would reverse Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban and overturn the state’s famously gerrymandered, Republican-friendly legislative maps."
But this is not yet sufficient cause for nationwide rejoicing. Too many States, like Florida and many others, still remain places where democracy comes to die, places where the Achilles heel of democracy enables the election of those who assist in its suicide by voting for candidates who oppose voting rights, women’s rights, gun control legislation, universal health care, the government’s economic ‘safety net’ and who ignore the truths of American history. Much work remains to be done.
An excellent example besides Florida is the State of Tennessee, where the State Legislature just threw two Black Democratic Representatives out of their seats in the legislature because of what they decided was their overly ardent support of restrictions on gun ownership. (Tennessee was the site of the most recent school massacre.) This is nothing new. It goes back to the Civil War, a conflict in which the losers ended up not losing all that much, other than the lives of hundreds of thousand soldiers in gray.
The secessionists who betrayed the Union were mostly forgiven in an effort to negate their secession and officially preserve the Union, Lincoln's original reason for going to war, before stopping the expansion of slavery became the war's prime mission. This 'forgiving' was accomplished by a flawed Reconstruction of the South in that it allowed the seceding States to return to their antebellum position, with only three Constitutional Amendments standing in their way, obstacles that State governments might find ways to attack. The birth of the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow laws were the result. What they lost on the battlefield, they won back through political horsetrading in the presidential election of 1876. Officially, slavery was dead, but its economic replacement was no great improvement.
Tennessee still hates the Federal government even though without FDR's Tennessee Valley Authority, they wouldn't have sufficient electrical power and there would be no water with which to flush their toilets. The University of Tennessee marching band features big bass drums labeled 'The Pride of the Southland.' Other than Jack Daniels whiskey and the music coming out of Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee doesn't have anything to be proud of, and too many of its citizens translate 'Southland' as meaning the defeated Confederacy.
In resolving this challenge, we cannot go back 150 years to undo the mistakes made after the Civil War. We must do so by going forward, inspired by the words of the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address.
And those words, that governments ‘derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.' as the Declaration of Independece reads, must be validated by concrete actions. As a start, we must use what remains of democracy as an antidote to two poisons that it has allowed to exist, undermining the 'consent of the governed,' the cloture rule (allowing filibusters) in the Senate and the nationwise process of political gerrymandering. Both are legal and they should not be.
Much of this will end up before the Supreme Court, the politicization of which has besmirched it. Right now, two conflicting lower court decisions concerning drugs used to effect non-surgical abortions will end up there. This may be the time for the President and the Democratic Senate majority to act to expand that Court so that it might better reflect 'the consent of the governed.' There is nothing in the Constitution to prevent that from taking place.
JL
* * *
A Shirt With a Message
The other day, I went food shopping wearing an old tee shirt from a demonstration four years ago after the Parkland school murders. The legend on it read “Grandparents Against Assault Weapons.’ Several shoppers complimented me on it and agreed. My reply to them was to ‘make sure you vote for candidates who support gun control.’ I dared not to suggest to them that the only real solution, as pointed out a week ago in this blog, is the repeal of the Second Amendment. That is the only way to end gun violence.
JL
* * *
From the blog’s Annals:
The Grove Ridge Nightcrawler
Jack
Lippman
The other evening, when taking a stroll to the end of my
street and back, something I should be doing more often, I encountered a worm,
the kind some people call nightcrawlers, trying to make its way across the
sidewalk from the grass strip along the street to the lawn in front of a
house. I decided that if, on my return
trip, I found that it had not succeeded, I would give it a hand. A few minutes later, heading back, I stopped
at the house where I had seen the worm and it was nowhere to be seen. It had successfully completed its journey.
A few minutes later, almost back to my house, I encountered
another worm engaged in the same task and not making very much progress. Knowing that I had resolved to assist the
first worm on its journey, which I never had to do, I wondered if it would not
be appropriate for me to live up to my resolve by helping the second worm. My conscience would not let me off the hook
so I bent over and picked it up, and tossed its wriggling body onto the grass
and dirt it was seeking to reach.
Homo sapiens has been the dominant species on our planet
for many thousands, if not millions, of centuries. But that wasn’t always the case. Before us, many varieties of life forms from
miniscule amoebas on up to massive dinosaurs were the chief residents of the
planet. It would be presumptuous of our
species not to believe that eventually, another species, finding the planet’s
changing environment more hospitable, will succeed us. It might be ants or grasshoppers or some
species yet to evolve, unknown today. It
might even be the creatures we call annelids, segmented worms or nightcrawlers
or their evolutionary descendants. I
hope that if that happens, they remember that back eons before, I gave one of
their ancestors a hand crossing a concrete sidewalk.
JL
* * *
The Route to an Orange Jumpsuit
Marty London is retired from a very
successful legal career. He posts on his
‘occasional’ blog on current affairs from a legal perspective. I suggest that you check out his posting of
April 6 by clicking right here or visiting https://londonsbh.blogspot.com/ . He doesn’t much
agree with Manhattan DA Bragg, and finally concludes by saying that ‘one way or another, we
are going to put Trump into an orange jumpsuit, but it ain't gonna be because
he got laid and lied about it.’ Read how he
comes to that conclusion.
JL
* * *
Followers of this blog may note that other than its inclusion in quotes from other sources, the name of the country's forty-fifth president never appears. He is usually referred to as the 'defeated former president.' That's because any mention of him, even truthful revelations of his perfidy, gives him the opportunity to respond, despite the dishonesty of his words. To his followers, that doesn't matter. Let them read about him elsewhere.
JL
* * *
Housekeeping
Email Alerts: If you are NOT receiving emails from me alerting you each time there is
a new posting on Jackspotpourri, just send me your email address and we’ll see
that you do. And if you are forwarding a posting to someone, you might
suggest that they do the same, so they will be similarly alerted. ( You can pass those email addresses to me by email at jacklippman18@gmail.com . )
Forwarding Postings: Please
forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it.
If you
want to send someone the blog, exactly as you
are now seeing it, with all of its bells and whistles, you can
just tell folks to check it out by visiting https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com
or by providing a link to that address in your email
to them.
There’s
another, perhaps easier, method of forwarding it too! Google Blogspot, the platform on
which Jackspotpourri is prepared, makes that possible. If you click on
the envelope with the arrow at the bottom of every posting, (it looks like
this: 
), you
will have the opportunity to list up to ten email addresses, along with a
comment from you, each of which will receive a link to the textual portion only of the blog that you now
are reading, but without the illustrations, colors, variations in typography,
or the ‘sidebar’ features such as access to the blog’s archives.
Either way will work, sending them that link or clicking on
the envelope at the bottom of this posting. It's your choice. Again, I urge you to forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading
it.
No comments:
Post a Comment