Not voting is not an option. Voting third party is not an option. Banding together behind Biden and voting blue down ticket is the only way to guarantee the survival of our democracy and the freedom it affords us.
In a bone-chilling piece published in The New York Times yesterday morning (July 17, 2023), the goals of Trump’s plans for a second term are clearly laid out and will bring an end to life as we know it. What is that goal? “…[T]o alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government…”
People said we were overreacting in 2016, and to those people I ask: How about now? Are you seeing it NOW?
We watched as that now-stacked Court took away the right to choose by overturning Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs decision, and in doing so, laid the groundwork to open questioning of every single other decision relating to American privacy rights, such as: Griswold v Connecticut (June 1965), which speaks to American’s right to use contraception; Loving v. Virginia (June 1967), granting the freedom to marry regardless of race; Lawrence v. Texas (June 2003), keeping the government out of the bedroom of consenting adults; and Obergefell v. Hodges (June 2015), granting same-sex couples the freedom to marry and be recognized as such. (A more complete list of U.S. Supreme Court Due Process cases can be found here.)
Most recently, they’ve ruled against Affirmative Action in college admissions and in favor of discrimination on the basis of religion. The latter of which has opened a whole Pandora’s box of rippling effects already and leaves the door open for justifying expansion of discrimination on seemingly any grounds.
“A business may think that it can refuse to serve interracial couples because it believes interracial marriage is wrong. A payroll company may … refuse service to women-owned businesses because the business owner believes women should not work outside the home. A bookseller of religious texts may believe it can refuse to sell books to a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints because he doesn’t believe it to be a legitimate religion,” wrote Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser in response to the ruling.
Not so much the “Land of the Free”, are we?
States’ attorney generals are illegally accessing medical records of transgender people and fighting against proposed federal rules aimed to protect people’s private healthcare information. In fact, these attorney generals want unbridled access—even across state lines—to the private healthcare records related to pregnancies, miscarriages, and abortions of anyone residing in their respective states without their consent.
Do you think that’s okay? Will you think it’s okay when they start nosing around in your private health records without your consent? No one is immune. Just because it’s starting with specific subsets of the population does not mean that’s where it will end. Your turn is coming. And we can know that it’s coming because they are literally telling us so.
Trump and the GOP are planning to institute completely un-American (and frightening) changes to how our government works, including bringing independent agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, Federal Communications Commission, and the Department of Justice under direct presidential control. You know, kind of like… a dictatorship.
The plan, coined Project 2025, is being backed by conservative and Republican organizations (such as the Heritage Foundation) and aims to consolidate presidential power in a way that would essentially dismantle the entire system of checks and balances our founding fathers designed with the hope of avoiding the possibility of something like this ever happening.
And it’s not just if Trump gets elected, it’s the plan for if and when *any* Republican next arrives in the Oval Office. ANY. REPUBLICAN.
They’ll be able to hire and fire at their own discretion. Disagree with them? Want to block their ideas and proposals? Buh-bye. Naysayers will be out and yea-sayers will be ushered in to take their place.
All the while they’ve been out there running their mouths and claiming to be patriots, feeding your fears to suit their own needs, and stoking the fires of discourse and hatred among us, they have been using you as a means to implement their plan to essentially overtake the government and recreate it to suit their self-serving visions. Not your visions. Their visions.
And their visions do not include any rights at all for me or for you or for your children or for your children’s children. Other than the right to live and die by their rule while busting your ass for their benefit and never, ever having any chance or hope of a chance of any other life. The Hunger Games but in real, everyday life—OUR real, everyday lives.
Let me say it again: Not voting is not an option. Voting third party is not an option. And voting Republican is absolutely not an option. Banding together behind Biden and voting blue down ticket is the only way to guarantee the survival of our democracy and the freedom it affords us.
The Republican party, once touted as the party of small government, is dead. It does NOT exist anymore. It is now the Trump-MAGA party: a party of white nationalists and Evangelical extremists, and of book-banning, rights-denying, voter-disenfranchising, anti-Americans. It’s up to us—me, you, your friends, your family—to thwart their plans, for as long as it takes to quash them entirely, by voting blue at every election every time.
We can do this. We can save our democracy. And we’ll do it together in true American fashion.
Post inspired by/regarding: “Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025” by Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman, The New York Times
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