Opinion: ‘Just Say No’ – part two

Andrew McKeever

GNAT-TV News Project

Andrew McKeever is the news director of GNAT-TV. The opinions expressed here are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of GNAT-TV.

As this is being written, electors around the country are meeting in state capitals to ratify and make official Donald Trump’s election as the nation’s 45th president. While there has been more attention paid this year to an event that during most election years is little more than a formality, it’s highly unlikely that 37 electors — the number need to flip the result of Nov. 8 –will change their votes from Trump to Hillary Clinton. So far only one Republican elector has stated a willingness to do so.

Difficult as it is to accept the outcome of an election badly compromised by very serious, act-of-war level allegations of Russian computer hacking and cyberwarfare, a very flawed result nevertheless will stand. The losing candidate “won” the popular vote by about 2.8 million, but because three key states — Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin, with a combined total of 44 electoral votes — went Trump’s way by about a combined total of 100,000 popular votes (out of more than 137 million cast nationwide), the Electoral College map broke 306- 232 for Trump, with 270 needed to win.

Given this conflicted result, it’s easy to ponder whether or not the Electoral College, a device conjured up by the Founding Fathers to smooth the passage of the U.S. Constitution and balance the interests of small states vs. larger states, should continue or be dumped as an historical anachronism. There’s a good argument that can be made for that. Whatever value it may once have had as far as binding the nation together has presumably been served after 227 years of perfecting the union. Unless, of course, the bitter polarization and division sown by one of the nastiest, least substantive, puerile elections ever proves to do some lasting damage to that ideal of union. And it might, if the campaign trail Trump proves little different from the President Trump. The events, appointments and statements that have issued from the ivory tower on Fifth Avenue have been inconsistent and hard to decipher, other than any presidential-elect who deems himself too smart to need daily intelligence briefings when holding victory rallies around the country is so much more important is cause for concern — to say nothing of his inane late-night tweeting fits.

One of the reasons we have landed into a situation of division and polarization reminiscent of 1968 and the Vietnam War-Civil rights era is because the national Republican Party, led by Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell and Ohio Representative John Boehner, and more recently Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, put electoral politics first and the welfare of the nation second. Early in President Obama’s first term, McConnell made his now famous vow that the Republicans should make it their number one goal to make Obama a one-term president. They didn’t succeed in that one, but once handed majorities in both houses of Congress following the 2010 midterm elections, they were united and wilful at opposing every single initiative the president advanced. Whether it was Obamacare or infrastructure, the R’s just said no — and were able to pull it off. Programs that might have assisted the very working class folks who apparently were the key to unlocking the White House to Trump were shelved. The president’s signature health insurance plan, which brought health insurance within reach to millions who could never afford it before, has been relentlessly attacked and repealing it is the number one domestic policy objective of the new administration. That’s of course if Trump’s often bombastic rhetoric is to be believed. What replaces it following its repeal is another question, but details like that don’t apparently keep the president-elect awake at night.

So the question then arises — should the same monolithic approach of rejecting everything the Trump administration proposes, domestically, at least, be greeted with a similar response by Democrats — a new version of “just say no”?

The goal being, of course, the laudable one of doing everything possible to make Trump a one-term president.

Trump may do the heavy lifting for the Democrats by being such a boorish, mendacious and off-putting character that voters will send him back to his penthouse on Fifth Avenue in 2020. But if he turns out to be a little more savvy — or if his advisors actually are able to steer him appropriately — should a replay of the GOP strategy of disagreeing with everything the president wants simply because the president wants it be a smart strategy at this time? The Democrat DNA seems, historically at least, to be less prone to acting in unity, as the gaps between moderate Democrats and their more progressive partners seems to lead them to air their differences more publically. Even if they were to manage keeping West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Vermont’s Bernie Sanders on the same page, is that the right and responsible — and then electorally successful — way to approach life in a government completely controlled by their opponents? A public infrastructure plan, the likes of which Obama pushed for as part of the 2009 stimulus, makes sense; the country surely needs more investment in its roads, bridges, tunnels and airports, to say nothing of our electric grid. How Trump’s ideas on tax policy play into this, and how such infrastructure improvements will be paid for, is another question. It’s almost funny, if the stakes weren’t so high, that the very party that once made debt reduction such a holy grail that programs they are now advocating for were shelved, now apparently is prepared to look the other way on the National Debt. This dance is enough to turn the merely jaded into true cynics.

The view here is that the Democrats do need to take at least the party unity page from the Republican playbook, and work together to block anything Trump proposes that smacks more of his self-aggrandizement than the national interest. Any program, laudable as it may be on its face, needs to have a plausible funding mechanism, not some deal-driven concoction with fine print and wiggle room like the ones Trump negotiated to build his luxury hotels and golf courses. They should be unrelenting in demanding, even at this late date, that Trump release his tax returns, maybe by submitting legislation to make that a requirement. Trump’s conflicts-of-interest between his business empire and the national interest need to be relentlessly picked over. In effect, they need to act like the election of 2020 has just begun.

The other key is for the Democrats to make clear who deserves the credit for blocking poorly thought out projects and their fiscal price tag, and that when, on the presumably rare occasions when they are willing to be bipartisan and unlike their GOP colleagues, put the country first, the word goes forth.

Long term, of course, the country and our national politics need to get back to the more bipartisan spirit of an earlier age when sitting down with members of the opposing party and fashioning compromises wasn’t a bad thing. You can’t say that the now quaint-seeming era before Newt Gingrich led the Republicans down a dangerous road of hyper-partisanship was some sort of golden age, when wise heads and strong leadership found the common ground and worked across the aisle. That did of course happen, and the country was better for it. Maybe if the Dems are capable of pulling off a tit-for-tat payback, both sides will be exhausted enough to try something really radical — agreeing with each other when they make sincere, honest efforts to find common ground. But until we get a clearer read on where Trump proposes to take the country — and we may never get that, since from one day to the next, his opinions may shift radically depending who he talked with last — the Democrats in Washington D.C. would be wise to keep a hyper-skeptical mindset, oppose Trump wherever possible, and do the sacred duty of making Trump a one-term anomaly.

Andrew McKeever is the news director of GNAT-TV. The opinions expressed here are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of GNAT-TV.