L&T Publisher Earl Watt
When Democrat Chuck Schumer decided to dismiss the impeachment charges against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas without a trial, he continued to erode the fabric of the republic.
The vote against Mayorkas in the House was partisan, with all Republicans voting to impeach and all Democrats voting against impeachment.
That’s the way politics work.
Once sent over to the Senate, a trial is expected and has always occurred until now. It seems rewriting precedence has been the theme of the past three years, from charging a previous president for criminal behavior to dismantling tradition and precedent in Congress.
There was no trial. Instead, Schumer and the Democrats simply voted to dismiss the case.
This is just another step away from the republican form of government we have in favor of the mob rule mentality of majority rule.
Standards have already been declining since Democrat Harry Reid was the majority leader of the Senate and decided to end the cloture rules on presidential appointees.
What used to take 60 senators now can be passed with only 51, or 50 plus the tie-breaking vote of the Vice President.
This lower threshold removes the requirement that the two parties compromise.
That train has long left the station.
Our rules were made to require compromise, to force our elected officials to work together to form public policy.
After all, in a country the size of America, there is no such thing as one size fits all, and if our government can’t find a rule that appeals to at least 60 percent, why would we have it?
But doing away with cloture in the Senate did just that, and it helped usher in the modern area of hyper partisanship.
That’s why it was always referred to as the “nuclear option,” and Reid started us down that road.
That allowed very partisan appointees to run various departments of the government and to be appointed to judges.
Depending on who was president, these appointments started to turn what should have been middle-of-the-road public servants into political activists.
The deterioration didn’t stop there. The Supreme Court has become a target for the masses. Since the current make-up of the court leans conservative, there was talk about adding as many as six more justices, all liberal, so that Democrats could push through any agenda they wanted without being checked by the Supreme Court.
What would happen if Republicans followed that with six more conservative justices? And so on, and so on.
The targets of the far left haven’t stopped at trying to take over the Supreme Court and all of the federal agencies.
The very idea of the filibuster has been challenged by those who once championed it.
When Democrats were in the minority, they defended the filibuster.
But now that they have a razor-thin majority in the Senate, not so much. They would gladly get rid of it if not for the resistance of Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, the last two middle-of-the-road Democrats who did not allow their party to discard this sacred tool.
The filibuster forces compromise, something that both parties should do more often than not.
Instead, we get massive swings of policies from the fringes, especially to the far left.
But the attack on America’s foundational compromises isn’t ending in the halls of Congress.
The calls to do away with the Electoral College are also growing.
When the nation was formed, the process of choosing the president was a hotly-debated piece of the new Constitution. States with large populations wanted a popular vote. States with small populations wanted one vote per state.
Neither would get their way and would compromise with the Electoral College, where each states gets to cast the number of Electoral votes based on a combined number of representatives and senators. While this still benefits larger populated states, it provides a slight weighted advantage to smaller states, a fair compromise.
But larger states want to back out of the agreement and create a popular vote process, again doing away with a key cornerstone of the Constitution. It would require an amendment, and they will push to do it.
This also leads to the question of the Senate, something else the far left abhors.
How can California, with almost 30 million people, be equal to Kansas which has less than 3 million? Each has two senators.
Far left Democrats thrive in the major cities where individualism is all but gone. Republicans do well in the rural areas where each person is still valued.
Having a Senate with rural states equal to urban states, which has been the case since the founding of the nation, is no longer tolerated in the one-party rule belief system of the far left.
With the filibuster on life support, the Electoral College facing challenges and even the Senate seen as unnecessary by the densely populated regions, the foundational compromises that created the nation are now up for debate. The nation never would have formed without these compromises. And it cannot exist without them remaining in tact.
Will we remain one nation, or will the far left succeed at eroding any and all roads that lead to compromise? The next year will tell.
