A 6-Year Plan for Us and Humanity

By Ronnie Dugger, Reader Supported News

23 March 17

 

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The American people, Democrats, Republicans, and independents, have been shown in poll after poll after poll to be demanding, by strong majorities, Medicare for all — single-payer national health insurance.

In the Republicans’ drive in Congress now to deprive 24 million people of their for-profit health insurance, Donald Trump has jeeringly exclaimed that all the Democrats can do is “delay, delay, delay.”

And he’s right. But the opposition leaders in Congress are so distracted and snarled up in Trump’s tweets, his open collusion with Russia against Clinton in the election last year, the Republicans’ and Trump’s proposed “American Health Care Act” for the billionaires against the poor, and now the Republicans’ morally rotten planned seizure of a Supreme Court seat that should have gone to President Obama’s nominee last year, that the Democrats have forgotten about what the people passionately want and their leaders should be again fighting for right now on a two- and a six-year plan.

Let’s step back from the Trumpdom & Daily Circus and do a little candid thinking together.

Since July last year the FBI has been investigating, as its director James Comey said Monday, whether the Trump campaign colluded in Russia with Putin’s operatives to swing the American election toward Trump over Clinton and, much to the point, whether crimes were committed in that conspiracy. This tells us, first, that late last year Comey went public against Clinton as the election was ending while he also stayed silent about the FBI’s active investigation of Trump and Russia conspiring to jimmy the same election. This means, second, that the Trump presidency is now in direct and serious danger of impeachment for colluding with Russia to win the presidential election of the United States.

Comey can get back the trust of the American people now by, as he promised Monday, continuing to follow the facts about Trump/Putin wherever they lead and, equally important, by immediately issuing a substantive first report from the FBI’s investigations about the Trump-Putin collaboration for the past nine months. After that he should give us regular candid and substantive reports, every two or three months or so, until the investigation is (in his maybe stalling-justifying word) “completed.” Nothing should outrank the public’s momentous right to honest reports from Comey on this historic investigation.

Senator Schumer of New York is correct, don’t you think, that the Gorsuch nomination to the Supreme Court should now be put on pause. Are these Republicans in Congress decent people, or are they shameless hacks for a lying President? If Gorsuch is cleared for the Court by the Senate majority with this pending over Trump, and after the FBI reports he is then impeached, Gorsuch’s nomination and therefore his Supreme Court seat would be invalidated; he would be subject to challenge as an illegitimate member among the nine justices.

Gorsuch is already, should we not think, (I do,) an illegitimate nominee because the Republicans unconstitutionally refused to give Obama’s nominee even a hearing for almost a solid year, and now are in effect physically seizing a seat on the Court that is not theirs to occupy. Under the circumstances, the FBI thunderstorm on its way, in self-defense Gorsuch himself should join Schumer’s call for a pause.

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The big picture’s big question now, although it is seldom specified, is whether Trump will be impeached and ejected as President.

This depends, in substantial parts, on the facts about his and his team’s complicity with Putin against the U.S. election; his blatant and impeachable violations of the Emoluments clause of the Constitution by refusing to put ownership of his holdings into a valid Blind Trust, explicitly retaining his ownership of them, thus turning the Presidency into his personal profit center at the explicitly prohibited constitutional risk of damaging the national interest; and his now world-notorious limitless lying, crippling not only his personal credibility and his capability to fulfill his constitutional duty to see that the laws are faithfully executed, but most dangerously, as commander-in-chief of our military and sole decider on using our nuclear weapons, endangering us and all humanity of catastrophe up to nuclear war during imminently forthcoming international military crises.

The major polls should now be asking the public, should President Trump be impeached?

Whether he is or is not, the Republicans’ nomination of him and his election by fewer than half the voters have created a national emergency. And acutely because of his sole and exclusive control over our nuclear weapons and because of his hostility against our national steps to help prevent earth-threatening climate change, this is in truth and fact also an emergency for the human species and the continuation of life on earth.

This is all so shockingly serious that it is reasonable to expect, shouldn’t we think, that even the Congressional Republicans, shameless fact-immune partisans most of them are proving themselves to be, if it comes to it enough of them will do some twisted gut-checks and realize they, too, personally, will vote for the United States and the human race against the worst liar and blowhard in the history of our Presidency.

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Back now to the present moments. As a people and individually we face together now not only the elections of 2018 but also those of 2020 and 2022.

Our elections are totally polluted and we the people raped by unlimited big-corporate and billionaires’ money. The “Supreme Court” has caused not only that, our supposedly nonpolitical supreme masters have also invented the non-law that corporations are human persons, their citizen-crushing “rights of free speech” lyingly outlasting, for example, even our human mortality. Congress has permitted the total militarization of our nation, the criminally unaudited misspending of our tax monies for our misnamed Department of War, and our military and our Presidents waging criminal and evidently permanent wars of aggression.

What we need, fellow citizens, is a six-year local and national plan to clean out — once and for all, for ourselves and for the human race — to clean out our White House, our Congress, our state legislatures, and the state capitols in each of our 50 states.

If Trump is not impeached and ejected, then in 2020 we have to re-elect him or elect his successor. We also face together during those next three election years the fact that we, us, you and I, will either defeat or elect every single member of Congress and the members of every state legislature throughout the United States.

Shall we not, then, take now the six-year view: Yes, Resist Trump! but also Yes! — Get to the actual work of focusing like laser beams on the persons who are our very own members of Congress and our very own state legislators and as well but not merely as usual on the Presidency and our statewide elected officials? All the new candidates, too — where are they on the issues that matter?

We need each nonprofit collaborating in resisting Trumpism to collect and distribute the votes cast by every incumbent official and what these votes mean, the candidates’ positions on the issues, whether that official or that candidate is a sellout or a reliably-enough supporter of the common good. Let them know we are informed and watching and they are accountable to us personally!

For example, during voting in committees or in the whole House or the Senate on the Ryan/Trumpcare bill gutting healthcare, the Democrats should get record votes on substituting, for the AHCA, single-payer Medicare for all. That will tell the people who are their friends and who are not. At every opportunity, from now to each forthcoming election — whether on a higher minimum wage, raising instead of lowering taxes on the rich and the gigantic corporations, an all-public-funds national infrastructure building program, adequate budgets for workers’ compensation, replacing cuts in public benefits with cuts in excessive military spending — with amendments and substitute motions, the Democrats should demand and get the record votes they need to show what they'll do for the people when they win again and to show up the real enemies of the people.

We can, if we can work together, decide that the organizations allied to save our country and humanity will, in planned concert, assign to specific organizations and persons among them the tedious, but vital work of giving complete attention to and recording of the Record Votes on the issues that matter. We need, matched to the candidates in the elections of 2018, 2020, and 2022, all the available salient record votes of every elected official in the country and in the states for the next six years. Target them!

The same goes for every candidate for any public office. To stop the lying that is now fundamentally accepted in our politics, which Trump incarnates, maybe before the campaigns we should devise contracts with us, the voters, that we require both candidates and officeholders to sign in advance. But that’s for later, I guess. Our democracy is and we are at mortal risk now. We need to just get organized, and get to know our neighbors in our own wards and precincts, and get going.

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Ronnie Dugger, founding editor of The Texas Observer and recipient of the 2011 George Polk career award in journalism, is now writing a book on the alleged nuclear ethics of nuclear weapons and nuclear war. He has published biographies of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, books about Hiroshima and universities, and articles and essays in The Nation, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and many other publications. His email is This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it