John

Maybe I can find better words later.  Distraught and disgusted this morning that our country is abandoning Ukraine, a democratic country fighting for its life against Russian dictator Putin.  Have we forgotten the fundamental lesson of WWII, that expansionist dictators are never satisfied, cannot be appeased and have to be stopped.

Donald Trump told Senate Republicans to kill the immigration reform bill and Donald Trump, in his admiration and affection of dictator Putin is causing House Republicans to not hold a vote on Ukraine aid which would certainly pass if brought to the floor.

Liz Cheney is right to refer to the “Putin” wing of the Republican party.  Our government, of the people, by the people and for the people requires that our Senators and Congress place country over partisan politics and vote!  The Speaker of the House, now captive of Trump / Putin, needs to get out of the way  and bring Ukraine aid to a vote.

This morning Donald Trump said he would tell Russia to, “do whatever the hell they wanted” with NATO countries that had not paid enough into the alliance. If you read through this web site you will see that I have pretty well avoided names and tried to focus on issues. But Trump is over the top again.

I would not suggest Russia attack anyone. Putin doesn’t need any encouragement. I would urge NATO members to pay their full dues using persuasion and maybe some domestic pressure. The least prepared is the first attacked. So don’t make a contest out of it.

If there was one single thing I could do for the Russian people it would be to stop the killing. But Putin started the war with Ukraine, a completely unprovoked attack. I’m waiting to see if Congress will continue support to Ukraine or abandon this democratic nation fighting for its life.

It is also clear that Trump does not understand the importance of a unified NATO to the security of Europe and the United States itself. No one has ever understood his infatuation with Putin and other dictators. It was not until Trump’s closed door meeting with Putin in Helsinki that the word “treason” entered my mind. Hypothetical question, did he tell Putin to do “whatever the hell he wanted” with Ukraine?

Plenty of media heads talking about what Senators were thinking in voting down the bipartisan immigration reform bill. In my view they were not thinking about what is best for our nation. See my previous post about Here We Go Again. What we are seeing at the southern border is a refugee migration, more like the Middle East and not generally seen before in the western Hemisphere. These are mostly good people looking for a better life. There are just far too many, far beyond the scope of out existing immigration laws. The proposed bipartisan immigration bill addressed these problems. It tightened asylum rules and ended “catch and release”. It expedited the asylum review process. It allowed and required the President to close the border entirely when numbers exceeded the Border Patrol holding facilities. It was humane. It was good legislation. Biden said he would sign it. I would have done so also.

I wanted to share this article about the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution

Heather Cox Richardson
Feb 5

On February 4, 1870, the Chicago Tribune announced: “The rebellion may now be regarded as over and the great war finished.” Referring to the Civil War, which had ended just five years before, the paper’s editor explained: “That rebellion was undertaken to preserve and perpetuate human slavery, and, within ten years from the date of the first secession ordinance, the great struggle has been terminated in the adoption of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments….”

On the previous day, February 3, 1870, enough states had ratified the Fifteenth Amendment to make it part of the U.S. Constitution. The Fifteenth Amendment was the last of the three Reconstruction Amendments, added to the U.S. Constitution both to bring the United States closer to the ideal of liberty promised in the Declaration of Independence and to make sure that insurrectionists could never again try to destroy the nation.

Key to that protection was cementing into the nation’s fundamental law the power of the federal government over the states.

Congress passed the first of the three Reconstruction Amendments, the Thirteenth, in January 1865, and the states ratified it on December 6 of the same year. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished human enslavement in the United States, except as punishment for a crime (an exception that later enabled the use of chain gangs). President Abraham Lincoln and the congressmen who embraced this monumental change to the Constitution expected that ending enslavement would end the power of a few elite southerners to dismantle the United States.

Enslavement, they believed, had enabled a few men to monopolize wealth and power in the American South, where they dominated state governments and wrote laws to protect their own interests. Those same men had taken over first the Democratic Party and then the national government, controlling the Supreme Court, the Senate, and the presidency.

The elite southerners insisted that the national government had no power to do anything that was not spelled out in the Constitution. It could protect the property interests of enslavers—through a law forcing free states to return escaped slaves, for example, or laws protecting enslavement in the western territories—but it could not do anything to help ordinary Americans, like dredging harbors, building roads, or establishing colleges, no matter how popular those measures might be.

During the Civil War, Lincoln and the Republicans rejected this old formula and created a new one. They pioneered a government that responded to the interests of ordinary Americans. Amending the Constitution to end enslavement was not simply an attempt to guarantee freedom for Black Americans; it was also designed to cement in place the government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Demonstrating that momentous change, the second section of the Thirteenth Amendment added: “Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” The first ten amendments to the Constitution—the Bill of Rights—limited the power of the federal government. The Thirteenth was the first to expand it.

Republicans knew that Black southerners supported this new government. They believed that poorer white southerners who had been crushed economically before the war as wealthy white enslavers gobbled up the region’s best land and who had borne the brunt of the war would also embrace it. Under the Republicans’ new system, the North had defied all expectations and thrived during the war, and Republicans thought its superiority to the old system was so obvious that ordinary southerners would jump at it.

Many did…but white lawmakers in the southern states did not. They agreed to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, but enabled by President Andrew Johnson, who took over the presidency after Lincoln’s assassination, they passed a series of laws that bound Black Americans to yearlong contracts working in white-owned fields, prohibited Black Americans from meeting together or owning guns, demanded that Black Americans behave submissively to white Americans, and sometimes punished white people who interacted with their Black neighbors.

The Chicago Tribune wrote, “The men of the North will turn the State of Mississippi into a frog-pond before they will allow any such laws to disgrace one foot of soil in which the bones of our soldiers sleep and over which the flag of freedom waves.” To counter these “Black Codes,” Congress wrote the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866, and the states ratified it in 1868.

Congress designed the Fourteenth Amendment to end forever the ability of state lawmakers to undermine the United States of America. The amendment declared anyone born or naturalized in the United States to be a U.S. citizen and then established the power of the federal government to stop states from discriminating against citizens. The Fourteenth Amendment establishes that states must treat everyone equally before the law, and they can’t take away someone’s rights without due process of the law.

With the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress tried to protect voting rights by establishing that states that did not permit Black men to vote would lose representation in Congress in proportion to the number of people they disfranchised. It also barred from office anyone who had previously taken an oath to support the Constitution and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” Finally, to guard against former Confederates undermining the nation by refusing to honor its debt, Congress added that “[t]he validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law…, shall not be questioned.”

Once again, the amendment gave Congress the “power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

Two years later, when it became clear that the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment for protecting a man’s right to have a say in his government had fallen short, the nation amended the Constitution a fifteenth time. The Fifteenth Amendment established that the right of citizens to vote could not be denied or restricted either by the United States or by any state “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Congressmen believed that so long as people could vote, they could elect lawmakers who would protect their interests.

Once again, the amendment gave Congress the “power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

It seems clear that the men who wrote the Reconstruction Amendments expected men like former president Trump to be disqualified from the presidency under the Fourteenth Amendment, as 25 distinguished historians of Reconstruction outlined in their recent brief supporting Trump’s removal from the Colorado ballot.

But the Fourteenth Amendment did far more than ban insurrectionists from office. Together with the other Reconstruction Amendments, it established the power of the federal government to defend civil rights, voting, and government finances from a minority that had entrenched itself in power in the states and from that power base tried to impose its ideology on the nation.

Yesterday, President Biden appealed the to U.S Supreme Court to allow the U.S. Border patrol to remove razor wire, placed by the State of Texas, along the banks of the Rio Grande River.

Razor wire is a military tool intended to entangle, cut and injure anyone who touches it. It is not the same as barbed wire and is not used to contain livestock because it can cause serious injury.

We have a serious problem with uncontrolled immigration at the southern boarder and I am sympathetic with the border states. who are forced to accept large numbers of immigrants. I have some ideas how to address this problem. However I cannot abide cruelty and razor wire is cruelty.

I hope our Supreme Court can see this. I’m surprised lower courts have apparently allowed it.

The last weeks put me over the top ….. I’m updating this website for 2024.  Political theater and the politics of outrage.  Both Gavin Newsom and Ron De Santis, showboats both, have shown they are not qualified for the presidency.

When Newsom first spoke out about De Santis’ thought police (banning school books, can’t use certain words) I applauded, but Newsom has gone too far.  While I support a woman’s right to choose, I want to respect those with other strong views and I sure don’t want my State to become the abortion destination for the whole country.  Besides the thought police, De Santis has jumped on the cruelty bandwagon on the immigration issue.  Since Florida has no boarder with Mexico he had to “borrow” some immigrants from Texas for his Martha’s Vineyard stunt.

I am about solving problems, not about performance-circus politics and certainly not about cruelty.  We have a big problem at the Mexican boarder but these immigrants are mostly good people looking for a better life, there are just far too many.  It is a refugee type problem, like we associate with war in the Middle East, which we have not seen previously in the Western hemisphere.  Certainly our immigration laws need to change to reflect the 21st century.  I am not unsympathetic to our boarder States burdened with millions of refugees.

For a starter, persons seeking refuge should apply for amnesty at US Embassies and Consulates in their home country or nearby countries.  There should be no guarantee they they can enter the United States except under the most extreme circumstances.

US business and industry should step up to help improve economic conditions in various Latin American countries.  Venezuela in particular has a wealth of oil and gas reserves to support energy independence in the Western hemisphere.

And for God’s sake let’s all admit that it is the market for illegal drugs in the United States that is fueling corruption and violence in Central America.

Russia says there is no need to use Nuclear weapons in Ukraine because there is no threat to the existence of Russia!  Oh hooray, but there was no need to use ANY weapons in Ukraine because there was never any threat to Russia.  The war was unprovoked seemingly because of the paranoid fantasy of one man, Putin.

I applaud Biden for saying, and not backing down, that this man should not remain in power.

The needless suffering of Ukrainians is heavily on my mind.  There are also thousands of Russian families that will be without sons and fathers.  What a fucking waste!

Ukraine poses absolutely no threat to Russia.  I think it is about resources and for Mr. Putin a desire to return to the lost days of the Soviet Union.

I’m proud of the unceasing efforts of the Biden Administration to head off a war in Europe through diplomacy and media pressure.

If the Russians do invade Ukraine, there will be world wide impacts particularly fuel prices which are already too high.  We need to increase energy production in the United States and other nations.  Heavens knows some South American counties need more jobs and income.  In the U.S. we need to first cause our energy companies to utilize existing leases on Public Lands.

I would support formation of a nationally owned energy company, to sell only within the United States, to help reduce and stabilize fuel prices.  This county and the whole world needs to move to clean, renewable energy sources as quickly as possible, but we must maintain energy independence and stable prices as we do so.

Some women have chosen to terminate a pregnancy for hundreds and probably thousands of years.  Whether Prohibition or Nation Building in foreign policy, some groups in our country have always had this tendency to want to impose their moral values on others.  We would be well to consider what happened regarding abortion in Ireland, a strongly Catholic country.  After 15-20 years of a total abortion ban, that country realized it was not realistic, not where women really live, and overturned it by national referendum.  I have no doubt some women will continue to seek abortion regardless the opinion of the Supreme Court.

The Texas law would allow any person to bring a civil lawsuit against any person who performed or assisted in providing an abortion.  A showing of personal harm is fundamental to bringing a lawsuit and how unrelated persons could be harmed by a woman’s choice or by anyone who assisted her is beyond me.  This is the most clearly unconstitutional aspect of the Texas law.  It also ignores the precedent of the viability test of current law.

I think the Justice Department along with women’s rights groups should ask the Supreme Court to reconsider this decision.

Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Adolf Hitler, history has shown the damage to nations and human civilization brought by charismatic con men.  Donald Trump is such a man.  I do not know why so many seem to believe his lies and irrationality.  Perhaps people of marginal view points have always been part of our society,  the internet has given them voice while Donald Trump has fueled the conspiracy theories.

The Republican Party has lost itself, now actively working to make it harder for people to vote.  Voting is the foundation of democracy.  I’ll repeat that the State of Colorado has had 100% mail balloting for seven years with only single digit problems.  The Republican Party has lost itself, against more voting because it may not go their way.  Mitch McConnell is the ultimate partisan, not a leader but the Senate’s biggest wimp.