MESSAGE
| DATE | 2021-03-11 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] George will love this ~~~
|
https://www.nysun.com/national/us-democracy-could-be-canceled-by-pelosis-hr1/91441/
U.S. Democracy Could Be in Peril By Pelosi’s HR1
By CONRAD BLACK, Special to the Sun | March 9, 2021
With any reservations about the integrity of the 2020 presidential
election being willfully suppressed by most of the national political
press and social media, and the Democrats as the governing party in the
White House, and the Capitol torquing up to try to secure the adoption
of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s bill H.R. 1, it is time to examine the
condition of American democracy.
Click Image to Enlarge
The British developed the common law and the Magna Carta that limited
the powers of the king, were early champions of parliamentary
government, and developed a broadening franchise throughout the
population roughly simultaneously with the United States, and devolved
institutions of democracy upon many other countries in its empire.
The roles of the United States and even to some degree, France, were
more prominent in inspiring the masses of the world with the vision of
democratic rule, however. The Americans expelled the British and
dispensed with monarchy and any inherited or imposed class structure at
all. And such were the polemical powers of Thomas Jefferson, Thomas
Paine, and other tribunes of the American Revolution, and the political
influence of the United States during and after World War II, that it is
America that has been the most influential country in assuring the
spread of democracy and the free market so broadly these past 75 years.
France proclaimed its faith in liberty, equality, and fraternity and
intellectually championed Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous assertion that
“Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains” and gave itself the
national mission of breaking those chains. Of course, the follow-through
was uneven. There followed the corrupted Directory, the authoritarian
Consulate, Napoleon, a sequence of monarchical restorations, and France
did not get down to the serious launch of a Republic until 1871.
And it did not promote democratic values in its empire as Britain did.
Britain did launch India, Canada, Australia, and other important nations
as democracies, and it abolished the slave trade 60 years before the
United States did, and abolished slavery throughout its empire more than
30 years before the United States emancipated its slaves.
There were also smaller European countries including Switzerland, the
Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Iceland that were early practitioners
of democratic government, but they were in no position to export it far
and had little of the impact on the world that the British, French, and
Americans did.
Even though the British and French acted earlier in ending official
racial discrimination, the United States, from its inception, was the
country to which the world looked, if not as it proclaimed itself, “a
new order of the ages,” still the first real republic in many centuries
and the first to be armed with carefully thought-out institutions of
government and with a clear pathway to becoming an immense and world
influential power.
Abraham Lincoln, as he abolished slavery to assure that “government of
the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the
earth,” captured the imagination of the whole world. In his second
inaugural, he famously stated that the survival of democracy depended
upon the abolition of slavery and that he was determined to accomplish
that no matter how many free man died doing so: even “if God wills that
every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be repaid with a drop of
blood drawn by the sword.”
When the German Emperor ordered his Navy to attack any American ship on
sight and President Woodrow Wilson had no choice but to enter the war,
he electrified the masses of the world by calling it “a war to end war
and to make the world safe for democracy.” In 1941, Franklin D.
Roosevelt and Winston Churchill laid out the precepts of a free postwar
world, though the British had to dissemble slightly in reference to
their empire.
President Truman and his successors defined the Cold War as one between
the Free World and the Communists, even though the Free World included
dictators Francisco Franco in Spain, António Salazar in Portugal), the
Shah of Iran, Syngman Rhee in South Korea, implicitly the House of Saud,
and many of the bemedaled juntas of South America.
Eventually, as America led its allies to an ultimately bloodless victory
in the Cold War, most of those allies became democracies, as have most
of the states liberated from the Soviet grip at the end of the Cold War.
As the Iron Curtain collapsed, the students of East Germany and of
Czechoslovakia read to their fellow crusaders for democracy from the
works of Jefferson and Lincoln (as well as Edmund Burke).
Now, 85% of Americans do not believe their press on political subjects,
more than 80% of Americans disapprove of the performance of the
Congress, and approximately 50% of Americans believe that the 2020
presidential election was rigged.
Many of the more vocal spokespersons for the current narrow majority in
government purport to believe that President Trump’s and his supporters’
allegations of the questionable integrity of last presidential election
constitute part of an attempt to overthrow the government unlawfully;
that this attempt exploded in the invasion and vandalization of the
Capitol on January 6, and that it continues.
The fact that there are some worrisome irregularities in the voting and
counting of votes in a number of the swing states is simply denied. The
fact that the Supreme Court in declining to hear a case from the
attorney general of Texas and supported by 16 other states that the
swing states in question failed to discharge their constitutional duty
to assure a fair presidential election, abdicated the coequal status of
the judiciary with the legislative and executive branches of government,
is ignored. National political media uniformly refer to questions of the
integrity of the last presidential election as discredited and debunked.
At least 95% of the national political press and 100% of the social
media platforms are opposed to the Republicans, who control most of the
states and have half of the Senators and are only a few votes short of
half of the Members of the House of Representatives.
The House has just passed a bill that would compel states to accept
mailed-in votes for 15 days prior to and 10 days after Election Day; set
up automatic and online voter registration; prohibit review of the
eligibility of voters; compel acceptance of ballots cast in the wrong
precincts; bar the removal of the ineligible voters from the rolls;
permit ballot harvesting; ban any voter identification laws; consign to
unelected officials the redrawing of congressional districts; infringe
upon free speech by the imposition of “onerous legal and administrative
burdens on candidates, civic groups, unions, and non-profit
organizations”; and establish a disturbingly named “Commission to
Protect Democratic Institutions” in order to end-run the courts.
The potential for gross abuse with these changes if they are enacted is
too obvious to require elaboration. Any opposition to it is labeled
“voter suppression.” If this bill is enacted, especially with the
provision for a bare majority vote on any issue in the Senate, and the
addition of two or four sure Democratic senators from Puerto Rico and
the District of Columbia admitted as new states, the question of whether
and to what extent the United States remains a government of laws and a
genuine democracy will not be possible to answer affirmatively with any
confidence.
________
CMBLetters-at-gmail.com. From American Greatness.
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
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