I fear that America’s grand experiment in democracy1 is over. Nearly forty percent of our nation’s electorate are passionately following the very kind of leadership which the framers of the U.S. Constitution sought to prevent from ever being in power. By dividing power among three separate branches of government, the Founding Fathers rejected the idea that our country should ever be led by someone wielding the power of a monarch that ruled by divine right and that answered to no earthly authority. The Separation of Powers embodied in the U.S. Constitution was supposed to ensure that accusations of wrong doing by anyone, (including, and especially, accusations made by the President), are backed up with evidence, presented in a court of law. Forty percent of America’s electorate2 does not care that 61 of 62 “election fraud,” lawsuits3 brought by the 45th President and his team, have failed. That forty percent of the electorate only cares that the 45th President said the words and therefore the words must be true; evidence, or the lack thereof, be damned.
Moreover, the paramount point of the U.S. Constitution was to mandate the peaceful transfer of power, election cycle after election cycle. When forty percent of any nation’s population is willing, nay eager, to forego the peaceful transfer of power in favor of violence, representative democracy can not survive.
1] As ubiquitous as is the phrase, “grand experiment”, in reference to America’s democracy, the phrase itself doesn’t appear until the later part of the 19th century. The concept is discussed in The Federalist Papers No. 9, by Alexander Hamilton, published on 21 November, 1787. One can find the word, “experiment”, used in reference to America, in a letter by Thomas Jefferson to John Tyler Washington, dated 28 June, 1804
2] Axios-Momentive Poll of 2,700 adults, conducted from 1-5 January, 2022. An earlier poll by the University of Massachusetts Amherst, conducted from 14-20 December, 2021, has the number at 33%. An even earlier poll by Politico/Morning Consult, conducted from 22-24 October, 2021, has the number at 35%.
3] The 45th President and his team, in challenging the legitimacy of the 2020 elections, brought 62 lawsuits to court. 61 failed; failed in courts presided over by judges from both political parties, including judges appointed by the self-same 45th President. The single remaining lawsuit was only partially successful, but it did invalidate the rule that had allowed Pennsylvania voters to “fix” their lack of voter identification up to 3 days after the election. This invalidated about 14,000 votes in a state that President Biden won by 48,000 votes. It is important to note that these 14,000 voters who had originally gone to the polls without proper identification could just as easily been Republican voters as Democratic voters....
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