Kamala Harris Is The Patriotic Choice For President

This is just part of an editorial by the New York Times editorial board: 

It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States than Donald Trump. He has proved himself morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest. He has proved himself temperamentally unfit for a role that requires the very qualities — wisdom, honesty, empathy, courage, restraint, humility, discipline — that he most lacks.

Those disqualifying characteristics are compounded by everything else that limits his ability to fulfill the duties of the president: his many criminal charges, his advancing age, his fundamental lack of interest in policy and his increasingly bizarre cast of associates.

This unequivocal, dispiriting truth — Donald Trump is not fit to be president — should be enough for any voter who cares about the health of our country and the stability of our democracy to deny him re-election.

For this reason, regardless of any political disagreements voters might have with her, Kamala Harris is the only patriotic choice for president.

Most presidential elections are, at their core, about two different visions of America that emerge from competing policies and principles. This one is about something more foundational. It is about whether we invite into the highest office in the land a man who has revealed, unmistakably, that he will degrade the values, defy the norms and dismantle the institutions that have made our country strong.

As a dedicated public servant who has demonstrated care, competence and an unwavering commitment to the Constitution, Ms. Harris stands alone in this race. She may not be the perfect candidate for every voter, especially those who are frustrated and angry about our government’s failures to fix what’s broken — from our immigration system to public schools to housing costs to gun violence. Yet we urge Americans to contrast Ms. Harris’s record with her opponent’s.

Ms. Harris is more than a necessary alternative. There is also an optimistic case for elevating her, one that is rooted in her policies and borne out by her experience as vice president, a senator and a state attorney general.

Donald Trump Is Unfit For Office!

 

The following is part of an editorial by The New York Times editorial board:

Next week, for the third time in eight years, Donald Trump will be nominated as the Republican Party’s candidate for president of the United States. A once great political party now serves the interests of one man, a man as demonstrably unsuited for the office of president as any to run in the long history of the Republic, a man whose values, temperament, ideas and language are directly opposed to so much of what has made this country great. . . .

Mr. Trump has shown a character unworthy of the responsibilities of the presidency. He has demonstrated an utter lack of respect for the Constitution, the rule of law and the American people. Instead of a cogent vision for the country’s future, Mr. Trump is animated by a thirst for political power: to use the levers of government to advance his interests, satisfy his impulses and exact retribution against those who he thinks have wronged him.

He is, quite simply, unfit to lead. . . .

We urge voters to see the dangers of a second Trump term clearly and to reject it. The stakes and significance of the presidency demand a person who has essential qualities and values to earn our trust, and on each one, Donald Trump fails. . . .

Voters frustrated by inflation and immigration or attracted by the force of Mr. Trump’s personality should pause and take note of his words and promises. They have little to do with unity and healing and a lot to do with making the divisions and anger in our society wider and more intense than they already are.

The Republican Party is making its choice next week; soon all Americans will be able to make their own choice. What would Mr. Trump do in a second term? He has told Americans who he is and shown them what kind of leader he would be.

When someone fails so many foundational tests, you don’t give him the most important job in the world.

Words Are Not Enough - We Need Police Reform NOW

 

The following op-ed is by Charles M. Blow in The New York Times:

The spectacle of a televised countdown to the showing of the video in which Tyre Nichols was savagely beaten by Memphis police officers doesn’t just theatricalize Black death; it is a damning indictment of American perversion.

It was horrific, as promised, but unfortunately not singularly so. It was instead yet another data point in a long line of videos showing the torturing of Black bodies by police. It was more snuff porn with Black victims in a country becoming desensitized to the violence because of its sheer volume.

America — and the world — had the realization that police violence was a problem, and then it simply walked away before the work was done and the war was won.

After the killing of George Floyd in 2020 and the historic summer of protest that followed, police killings of American citizens didn’t decrease; they increased. What fell away were the evanescent allies, poll-chasing politicians and cooped-up Covid kids who had used the protests as an opportunity to congregate.

Even Black people’s support for the Black Lives Matter movement eventually began to fall.

And as Americans shifted to other priorities like politics and the economy, the broader public became desensitized to police killings, or it callously started to see the police killings as unfortunate but ultimately acceptable byproducts of much-needed increased policing at a time of rising crime.

To break through, a killing would have to be truly gruesome and barbaric, the circumstances around it truly ghoulish and the victim of it truly unassailable.

That case has now arrived with the death of Nichols, a Black man, after his horrific beating at the hands of five Black Memphis police officers.

Authorities moved relatively quickly to fire, arrest and aggressively charge the officers.

But instead of leaping to my feet to applaud a system working as it should, rather than as it was designed, I am stuck on the fact that there should have been federal legislation to prevent such killings.

But there wasn’t, and there isn’t, because America has once again failed Black people who were pleading for help and demanding it.

America should be ashamed. It abandoned the issue of police reform.

After Covid lockdowns eased and people were once again gathered for things other than protest, their priorities snapped back to a noninterventionist normality. Their cabin-fever racial consciousness was like some kind of delirium, an outgrowth of end-of-the-world ideations.

As the world reopened, elections approached and crime and inflation rose in tandem, interest in police reform and protecting Black lives from police violence melted away like ice cubes on a summer sidewalk.

And with it, America was taught some horrendous lessons that do more harm to the quest for equality than the protests did to promote it.

Black people were taught that for some, interest in their safety had simply been a dernier cri, that allyship could be transitory and transactional, that some people entered the fight through a turnstile and that when their interest and energy waned, they exited the same way.

Too many liberal politicians showed us that their commitment to legislation, and even language, to protect Black lives from police violence was polling dependent, not rooted in moral rectitude or core values but governed by their ideas’ public appeal. When the winds shifted, these politicians spun like a weather vane.

They ran scared of being labeled woke or supporting a “defund the police” ideology. Rather than rebrand a laudable effort to be smarter about how municipal funds are allocated with a more acceptable slogan, they did the lazy, politically expedient thing: They raced to neutralize the idea by proclaiming their direct opposition to it, not defunding the police but increasing funding to police.

Police unions also learned a lesson: that they could survive the most intense and coordinated denunciation of their practices they had ever faced and still dodge federal legislation to address the violence that happens on their watch.

Yes, states like California and New York moved quickly, while the issue was still in vogue, to rewrite some criminal codes, and a smattering of cities increased protection by doing things like strengthening “duty to intervene” policies, but national reform remained elusive.

If there are rare occasions to employ a cliché, this is one: They dodged the bullet.

If there is a silver lining in all of this, it is at present an anecdotal one. It is the seeming impact that Black women have had to disrupt the system when given power not necessarily to prevent violent excesses but at least to punish them.

The police chief who moved quickly to fire the officers in the Nichols case is a Black woman.

When Rayshard Brooks was killed in Atlanta at a drive-through, the mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, a Black woman, accepted the resignation of her police chief and decided that the officers should be fired immediately. (Unfortunately, the officers were not eventually charged in the case, sued the city and were reinstated.)

When a white Dallas police officer, Amber Guyger, walked into the apartment of Botham Shem Jean and shot him to death, Police Chief U. Reneé Hall, a Black woman, moved quickly to secure a warrant for the officer’s arrest. Guyger was convicted of murder in the case.

I don’t want to imply that a handful of cases are universally revelatory but to circle them as curiosities worthy of keeping an eye on.

Rather than pointing to a system that is evolving and becoming more humane, these examples only underscore the racialized nature of the system and how slow it has been to act in places where neither the people in power nor the accused officers were Black.

Tyre Nichols’s death isn’t only an individual tragedy; he is now a marquee victim of a predacious system that America has lost its willingness to confront. The untreated wound, still festering, bled through the gauze.

The Country's Not Ready For The End Of Roe Vs. Wade

The following post is from the editorial board of The New York Times: 

Imagine that every state were free to choose whether to allow Black people and white people to marry. Some states would permit such marriages; others probably wouldn’t. The laws would be a mishmash, and interracial couples would suffer, legally consigned to second-class status depending on where they lived.

It seems an unthinkable scenario in 2022. That’s because in 1967 the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that barring interracial marriage, as 16 states still did, violates the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. “Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the state,” the court stated in Loving v. Virginia.

More than half a century on, Loving is considered one of the court’s great rulings, and yet it was not universally admired at the time. Southern states complied only grudgingly; Alabama didn’t repeal its ban on interracial marriage until 2000. That’s the point of having a federal Constitution that is supreme; the guarantees and rights in that document apply to all Americans equally, wherever they live. The court system — and the Supreme Court in particular — exists to protect those rights when state and local authorities refuse to.

Many who oppose Roe v. Wade today, and even some who support it, argue that the 1973 ruling short-circuited a running debate over abortion, a debate that should have been allowed to play out in the states, many of which had long banned abortion. This is one of the main justifications in the leaked draft opinion in which a majority of Supreme Court justices appear ready to overturn Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that preserved Roe’s central holding with certain restrictions.

The problem with this reasoning is that, as in Loving, leaving the matter to individual states and the political process means that millions of Americans will be denied their fundamental rights — in this case, the right of women to decide what happens inside their own bodies.

The draft opinion relies heavily on the lack of a mention of abortion in the Constitution, and therefore argues that the document cannot be the basis for the right to terminate a pregnancy. The Constitution also says nothing about interracial marriage, but that didn’t prevent the justices from finding in the 14th Amendment the guarantee that no couple may be treated differently because of the color of their skin.

In short, constitutional rights are meaningless unless they apply across the entire country. That is why the Supreme Court decided Loving v. Virginia and Roe v. Wade as it did. These rights are inherent in the Constitution, even if they are not explicit in it.

The principle is clear: Women and men should have equal control over their own bodies, as many Americans believed in 1973 and a majority believe today. And yet the right to choose whether to terminate a pregnancy is on the verge of being eliminated because five members of the current Supreme Court don’t like it.

Congress has failed repeatedly to codify the protections of Roe and Casey in federal law despite various efforts, not only from Democrats but also from two Senate Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

Top Democrats are now left planning a vote on an abortion rights bill that they know has zero chance of passing. This is an empty gesture, coming after years of the Democratic Party failing to provide meaningful leadership on reproductive freedom despite the clear warning signs that Roe was endangered.

President Biden, as leader of the party, has an obligation to take the threat to Americans’ constitutional rights seriously by doing all he can to protect access to abortion where it still exists. The White House can encourage regulators to make it easier for women to get medication abortions and over-the-counter birth control, to challenge state laws that limit access to medication abortions and to lease federal property to abortion providers. This would at least show a commitment to the issue, even if legislative options are limited.

Overall, the outlook for reproductive freedom is bleak. In 13 states, “trigger” laws will automatically or very quickly ban abortions after Roe is overturned, as seems highly likely. In about a dozen other states, lawmakers are gearing up to severely restrict access to abortions, if not effectively prohibit them, as Texas has already done without interference by the Supreme Court.

The upshot: Within a few months, abortion could be illegal in more than half the states. The anti-abortion movement isn’t stopping there. Efforts are already underway to impose a nationwide ban on abortion as soon as Republicans regain the White House and Congress, which could happen as soon as 2025.

For the foreseeable future, the real battle for reproductive freedom will be fought in the states, by regular Americans, and their state and local representatives, who are trying to protect this fundamental right while they still can. That means, first and foremost, securing more access.

California lawmakers are moving quickly to pass a package of billsthat would make their state, the most populous in the country, also one of the most accessible for women seeking to exercise their reproductive freedom.

Those most in need of abortions are often the least able to afford them. States that want to protect reproductive freedom are helping to pay for the procedure and for the travel required to obtain it — costs that can easily run into the thousands of dollars and are prohibitive for many women. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show the percentage of abortion services in Illinois and New York provided to nonresidents has already risensharply over the past decade, a trend driven by increased restrictions on abortion in other states.

New York lawmakers are considering a bill that would direct funds to abortion providers, allowing them to increase staffing and security to meet already rising demand. In March, Oregon lawmakers approved a $15 million fund for these purposes, which should help provide access to abortion not only for residents of the state but also for those in neighboring Idaho, which has already passed a bill that would prohibit abortions after about six weeks.

All laws are subject to being overturned when the political winds shift, of course. That’s why abortion-rights groups in some states are focused on their own constitutions. In New York, supporters of abortion rights, including Gov. Kathy Hochul, are pushing for a constitutional amendment that would go before New York voters in 2024, to protect reproductive rights in case the State Legislature falls into Republican hands. In Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer last month asked her state’s Supreme Court to rule that the Michigan Constitution affirmatively protects the right to an abortion.

Finally, pro-choice states are realizing they have to play some strategic defense when it comes to protecting abortion providers, and possibly women who get abortions themselves, from states that reach outside their borders to force their anti-abortion laws on everyone else. Missouri lawmakers, for example, are considering a bill that would allow its residents to sue anyone in any state who helps a Missouri resident get an abortion.

In anticipation of laws like these, a bill in New York would bar law-enforcement authorities from assisting in the out-of-state investigation of abortion providers or women who seek abortions in New York. The Connecticut General Assembly has gone even further, passing a law to allow providers in the state to countersue anyone who sues them for damages for providing abortion care.

Meanwhile in Louisiana, a state that still imposes the death penalty, lawmakers recently passed out of committee a bill that would define a fertilized egg as a full person — meaning that anyone who performs an abortion, and any women who obtains one, could be charged with murder.

What all this shows is that the right to an abortion cannot be left at the mercy of individual states — something that few people on either side of this issue genuinely seem to want.

This is why a national standard is necessary. That national standard, at least for a few more weeks, is Roe v. Wade as modified by Planned Parenthood v. Casey. These two rulings are not perfect, but for all their flaws, they have managed to strike a delicate balance that reflects the public’s complex position on a morally fraught issue. The majority of Americans do not want these cases overturned, and an overwhelming majority say that abortion should not be banned outright.

If you thought Roe v. Wade itself led to discord and division, just wait until it’s gone.

Stop Pretending The Pandemic Is Over - It's NOT!

 

From the editorial board of The New York Times comes a warning America would do well to heed. Here is a part of that they wrote:

The worst of the Covid-19 pandemic may be behind us, but pretending that it is over will not make it so. A new Omicron subvariant, BA.2, is driving up coronavirus case counts in Europe and Asia, and experts predict it soon will account for the majority of new cases in the United States. The impact is uncertain. On the one hand, many Americans have already been infected by a similar strain of the virus. On the other hand, BA.2 arrives as people increasingly are resuming prepandemic behaviors, and according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, roughly one-third of Americans have not completed their initial round of vaccinations, and more than 70 percent have not received booster shots.

In the face of this uncertainty, it would be reckless for the government to reduce its efforts to minimize new cases and help those who fall ill. Yet that is exactly what is happening after Congress recently failed to approve $15.6 billion for tests, treatments and vaccines.

Denied the funding it needs, the Biden administration is curtailing its efforts to combat the virus. Last week, the administration said that it would reduce the distribution of highly effective monoclonal antibody treatments by more than 30 percent and that it would be forced to end shipments this spring. It also stopped accepting reimbursement claims for Covid-19 tests and treatments from uninsured Americans; vaccine reimbursements will be accepted only through April 5. And the government said that it lacked sufficient funds to place an order for enough doses of vaccines to ensure the availability of booster shots later this year.

Congress must approve more funding immediately. Ensuring that Covid tests, treatments and vaccines remain readily available is the best way to prevent new waves of infections and to preserve the progress so far toward the end of the pandemic.

Failing to maintain adequate public funding means Americans increasingly will have to rely on their own resources. In effect, the United States is reverting to its usual approach to health care: Those with money and insurance will be able to get tests and treatments; those without may not. The price for a dose of monoclonal antibody treatment can approach $2,000, and even the relatively modest cost of test kits or vaccinations can discourage people from taking the basic steps necessary to protect themselves and others. . . .

It is worth underscoring that much of what the Biden administration is requesting should not require emergency funding. The United States ought to maintain funding for public health, including the resources to monitor infectious diseases and to develop new vaccines and treatments, in the same way that it maintains funding for other forms of national defense. The gaping holes in the nation’s public health infrastructure, which the pandemic exposed, were created by exactly the kind of shortsightedness now on display.

Jan. 6th Is NOT Over - The GOP Continues It In Every State

It would be nice to think that the insurrection of January 6th was over. That our democracy was saved and Americans can get back to the business of governing a democracy. But that is not the case. January 6th was just the opening volley in the GOP's war against our democracy, and they continue the insurrection in every state (especially those state in which they have control).

The following is part of an excellent editorial by the editorial board of The New York Times:

One year after from the smoke and broken glass, the mock gallows and the very real bloodshed of that awful day, it is tempting to look back and imagine that we can, in fact, simply look back. To imagine that what happened on Jan. 6, 2021 — a deadly riot at the seat of American government, incited by a defeated president amid a last-ditch effort to thwart the transfer of power to his successor — was horrifying but that it is in the past and that we as a nation have moved on. . . .

Jan. 6 is not in the past; it is every day.

It is regular citizens who threaten election officials and other public servants, who ask, “When can we use the guns?” and who vow to murder politicians who dare to vote their conscience. It is Republican lawmakers scrambling to make it harder for people to vote and easier to subvert their will if they do. It is Donald Trump who continues to stoke the flames of conflict with his rampant lies and limitless resentments and whose twisted version of reality still dominates one of the nation’s two major political parties.

In short, the Republic faces an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends. No self-governing society can survive such a threat by denying that it exists. Rather, survival depends on looking back and forward at the same time.

Truly grappling with the threat ahead means taking full account of the terror of that day a year ago. Thanks largely to the dogged work of a bipartisan committee in the House of Representatives, this reckoning is underway. We know now that the violence and mayhem broadcast live around the world was only the most visible and visceral part of the effort to overturn the election. The effort extended all the way into the Oval Office, where Mr. Trump and his allies plotted a constitutional self-coup.

We know now that top Republican lawmakers and right-wing media figures privately understood how dangerous the riot was and pleaded with Mr. Trump to call a halt to it, even as they publicly pretended otherwise. We know now that those who may have critical information about the planning and execution of the attack are refusing to cooperate with Congress, even if it means being charged with criminal contempt.

For now, the committee’s work continues. It has scheduled a series of public hearings in the new year to lay out these and other details, and it plans to release a full report of its findings before the midterm elections — after which, should Republicans regain control of the House as expected, the committee will undoubtedly be dissolved.

This is where looking forward comes in. Over the past year, Republican lawmakers in 41 states have been trying to advance the goals of the Jan. 6 rioters — not by breaking laws but by making them. Hundreds of bills have been proposed and nearly three dozen laws have been passed that empower state legislatures to sabotage their own elections and overturn the will of their voters, according to a running tally by a nonpartisan consortium of pro-democracy organizations.

Some bills would change the rules to make it easier for lawmakers to reject the votes of their citizens if they don’t like the outcome. Others replace professional election officials with partisan actors who have a vested interest in seeing their preferred candidate win. Yet more attempt to criminalize human errors by election officials, in some cases even threatening prison.

Many of these laws are being proposed and passed in crucial battleground states like Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia and Pennsylvania. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, the Trump campaign targeted voting results in all these states, suing for recounts or intimidating officials into finding “missing” votes. The effort failed, thanks primarily to the professionalism and integrity of election officials. Many of those officials have since been stripped of their power or pushed out of office and replaced by people who openly say the last election was fraudulent.

Thus the Capitol riot continues in statehouses across the country, in a bloodless, legalized form that no police officer can arrest and that no prosecutor can try in court. . . .

A healthy, functioning political party faces its electoral losses by assessing what went wrong and redoubling its efforts to appeal to more voters the next time. The Republican Party, like authoritarian movements the world over, has shown itself recently to be incapable of doing this. Party leaders’ rhetoric suggests they see it as the only legitimate governing power and thus portrays anyone else’s victory as the result of fraud — hence the foundational falsehood that spurred the Jan. 6 attack, that Joe Biden didn’t win the election. . . .

Polling finds that the overwhelming majority of Republicans believe that President Biden was not legitimately elected and that about one-thirdapprove of using violence to achieve political goals. Put those two numbers together, and you have a recipe for extreme danger. . . .

Whatever happens in Washington, in the months and years to come, Americans of all stripes who value their self-government must mobilize at every level — not simply once every four years but today and tomorrow and the next day — to win elections and help protect the basic functions of democracy. If people who believe in conspiracy theories can win, so can those who live in the reality-based world.

Above all, we should stop underestimating the threat facing the country. Countless times over the past six years, up to and including the events of Jan. 6, Mr. Trump and his allies openly projected their intent to do something outrageous or illegal or destructive. Every time, the common response was that they weren’t serious or that they would never succeed. How many times will we have to be proved wrong before we take it seriously? The sooner we do, the sooner we might hope to salvage a democracy that is in grave danger.

Is The Republican Party Being Destroyed By Donald Trump?

 Several of Trump's opponents in the 2016 Republican primary warned voters that nominating Trump would be devastating for their party. Republicans nominated Trump anyway, and by a quirk of the electoral college, he became president. 

But those opponents weren't wrong. It has just taken a bit longer than expected.

I recommend you read the entire editorial, but here is just a tiny part of what the editorial board of The New York Times has to say about Trump killing the Republican Party:

Of all the things President Trump has destroyed, the Republican Party is among the most dismaying.

“Destroyed” is perhaps too simplistic, though. It would be more precise to say that Mr. Trump accelerated his party’s demise, exposing the rot that has been eating at its core for decades and leaving it a hollowed-out shell devoid of ideas, values or integrity, committed solely to preserving its own power even at the expense of democratic norms, institutions and ideals.

Tomato, tomahto. However you characterize it, the Republican Party’s dissolution under Mr. Trump is bad for American democracy.

A healthy political system needs robust, competing parties to give citizens a choice of ideological, governing and policy visions. More specifically, center-right parties have long been crucial to the health of modern liberal democracies, according to the Harvard political scientist Daniel Ziblatt’s study of the emergence of democracy in Western Europe. Among other benefits, a strong center right can co-opt more palatable aspects of the far right, isolating and draining energy from the more radical elements that threaten to destabilize the system.

Today’s G.O.P. does not come close to serving this function. It has instead allowed itself to be co-opted and radicalized by Trumpism. Its ideology has been reduced to a slurry of paranoia, white grievance and authoritarian populism. Its governing vision is reactionary, a cross between obstructionism and owning the libs. Its policy agenda, as defined by the party platform, is whatever President Trump wants — which might not be so pathetic if Mr. Trump’s interests went beyond “Build a wall!”

Donald Trump Is Not Fit To Be President Of The United States

 I can't believe anyone could still be undecided about who to vote for in this presidential election. But if you are one of those rare individuals, read what the editorial board of The New York Times had to say about Trump. They wrote:

Donald Trump’s re-election campaign poses the greatest threat to American democracy since World War II.

Mr. Trump’s ruinous tenure already has gravely damaged the United States at home and around the world. He has abused the power of his office and denied the legitimacy of his political opponents, shattering the norms that have bound the nation together for generations. He has subsumed the public interest to the profitability of his business and political interests. He has shown a breathtaking disregard for the lives and liberties of Americans. He is a man unworthy of the office he holds.

The editorial board does not lightly indict a duly elected president. During Mr. Trump’s term, we have called out his racism and his xenophobia. We have critiqued his vandalism of the postwar consensus, a system of alliances and relationships around the globe that cost a great many lives to establish and maintain. We have, again and again, deplored his divisive rhetoric and his malicious attacks on fellow Americans. Yet when the Senate refused to convict the president for obvious abuses of power and obstruction, we counseled his political opponents to focus their outrage on defeating him at the ballot box.

Nov. 3 can be a turning point. This is an election about the country’s future, and what path its citizens wish to choose.