Maryland's Republican Gov. Larry Hogan wrote-in former President Ronald Reagan on the ballot he mailed in last week rather than vote for either President Donald Trump or his Democratic challenger Joe Biden.(1)
Let’s see what we can take away from this.
First, we can note that even Republicans are allowed to vote by mail, despite the demonizing of mail balloting by Trump and his lackeys.
Second is the admission by a prominent Republican that no GOPer with a pulse is worthy of consideration for the highest office in the land. Instead, he dug up a corpse moldering for a decade-and-a-half.
*
The motto of my alma mater, The City College of New York, is Respice, Adspice, Prospice, which translates (for those who don’t regularly converse in Latin) as: “Look to the past, Look to the present, Look to the Future.”
The Republican Party, unfortunately, appears to adhere only to the first part of the motto, digging up dead (bad) actors is only the latest evidence of that. The New Yorker in a recent article details how the Trump’s Secretary of Labor is systematically turning back the clock on protections for employees against hazardous working conditions.(2)
And not only the Department of Labor. The New York Times, in an article entitled “A Regulatory Rush by Federal Agencies to Secure Trump’s Legacy,”(3) cites the efforts by “a broad range of federal agencies” to send the country back in time to a more dangerous, more polluted past.
The nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg has raised warnings about a new “Lochner Era” at the Supreme Court. The Lochner Era (1897 to 1937) saw the Court throw out laws on “the minimum wage, child labor or other business regulation.”(4) As David Leonhardt points out, most voters support efforts to “reduce carbon emissions sharply, strengthen labor unions, raise taxes on the rich, make college and health care more affordable,” while “conservative judges like Barrett generally do not, and they have been willing to strike down laws they don’t like.”
So, it’s “fasten your seat belts, it’s full power backwards!”
*
The great 17th/early-18th century architect Sir Christopher Wren designed 53 London churches and St. Paul’s Cathedral. He was buried in St. Paul’s,
the tomb covered by a simply inscribed slab of black marble. On a nearby wall his son later placed a dedication, including a sentence that was to become one of the most famous of all monumental inscriptions: “Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice” (“Reader, if you seek a monument, look about you”).(5)
*
What monument do we see when we look about? A nation under assault by a deadly virus (proclaimed “a hoax” by the Republican Party’s leader); a growing threat by white nationalists (emboldened by wink-wink messages from that leader); worldwide dismay by our friends and allies, who see that leader cosy up to the planet’s worst rulers; a health care system under threat by its own government; the human rights of gay, lesbian, and transgender people being trampled, and on and on.
We look about. The Republicans look back—some even alluding to “the good old days of segregation.”(6) Lindsey Graham being “sarcastic”—har, har!
We also look forward—prospice—in the hope that we can make a better country— a better world to be our cathedral.
***
(5) https://www.britannica.com/biography/Christopher-Wren
(6) https://news.yahoo.com/senator-lindsey-graham-defends-reference-180323178.html
No comments:
Post a Comment