The Conversation

Okay, the political season is heating up and I just saw a post stating that Hillary Clinton is now completely shut down, complete with an article about her issues with her emails while Secretary of State. The other one I saw was a photo of Senator Ted Cruz with the caption, "The Great White Dope."

Here are the facts: Hillary Clinton is not currently running for President. And, if she is considering a run, she has got to be wondering, "Do I want to wade into this personal attack-fest? Really??" Obviously, Senator Cruz has decided. And he has waded in. And despite the caption, people who know the Senator know he's no pushover in a debate.

To be honest, I believe a President Cruz would end America as I know it. He honestly believes that, in order to lead, one must refuse all compromise and all thought of compromise. That's four to eight years of gridlock in the Executive—which is not generally known for gridlock. I think he would veto the first thirty bills sent him from Congress—unless they perfectly lined up with his extremist stance.

But I am very happy he is running. He is a very intelligent person, a real serious debater and would be very open to multiple Presidential debates as well as debates to win his party's nomination. And we need this. We need to know what the policies will be after President Obama leaves office. We need to discuss policy and not personality and the only thing we're doing in politics is attacking the person.

Today, I saw a posting claiming that President Obama is breaking the laws. The article behind the post utterly fails to cite one single law the President has broken, then goes on to suggest impeachment. I would urge the writer to write his congressman and also to cite the law the President has broken. The House of Representatives is empowered to impeach a President "for high crimes and misdemeanors," as it says in the Constitution. The result is a trial in the Senate.

Seeing as how President Obama does have a law degree and he used to teach Constitutional Law, I doubt the claim is true. But the claim is yet another attempt to stop any conversation about policies in the United States. Laws come from policy and we, the American People need to consider policies that will affect us. Because you had better believe that big corporations do—they regularly write laws they would like to say, hand them to congresspeople and then lobby the congresspeople to pass them.

Do you want an increase in the minimum wage in America? Do you want the federal government to be involved in taking care of Americans, like those in Oklahoma who just lost their homes to an early tornado? Do you want to see our Veterans (and we just made a whole lot of them in Iraq and Afghanistan) taken care of with a VA that works for them? What policies do you want our government to pass into law?

Attacking individuals because they are bad or mad is not policy and is not the kind of a discussion that we need to have as we go forward towards 2016.

"He has done nothing"

Today, my daughter asked me why people have claimed that President Obama "has done nothing." I have seen this comment spring up lately and have wondered at it. After all, it was President Obama who, in his first 100 days, got a stimulus bill through the House and the Senate, managed to eke the Affordable Care Act by a Republican-controlled (with a 40 out of 100-vote "majority") Senate and has taken a "can do" attitude with respect to America being a strong nation. Our unemployment is down, stocks on Wall Street have recovered and it looks like the housing market is slowly recovering.

Yet Republicans say that Obama has done nothing. But they complained bitterly about him when he did do something (with a largely Democratic legislature) and they freak out whenever he does something with his Executive Power (calling him a dictator or something worse). They claim that he has violated the Constitution, violated our laws and have pretended that they can practice Diplomacy, when that is the prerogative of the Executive (and not of the Speaker of the House who invited an Israeli politician to use the US House and Senate as a backdrop for his re-election campaign; and not the 47 Republican senators who signed on to Freshman Senator Tom Cotton's nastygram to the Ayatollah in Iran).

If President Obama is "doing nothing," why are Republicans rushing around trying to stop what he is doing? If this President has been a "do-nothing" President, why is it that they're trying to repeal his laws?

I suppose Mitch McConnell initiated this whole stance. As a Senator, Obama ran for President with the promise to try to engage the other side. In fact, he wanted to engage everyone, promising to sit down with Iran and discuss differences if that was offered. Republicans had a real problem with that. But McConnell's entire goal was to make this President fail. And when he did not fail to be re-elected, he has persisted in trying to make this Presidency fail—to deny him a legacy, deny him any shred of a hope that he might be seen as a good President by historians. And the entire Republican caucus in Washington has followed suit.

Could it possibly be because his predecessor actually was the worst President in modern US history? Could it be that Mitch McConnell actually acknowledges that? I do note that many members of the Bush administration have been desperately trying to "rehabilitate" the 8 years of a doctrine that justified the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (Pre-emptive attack on Iraq), the complete rejection of the Geneva Accords on torture (a treaty that was negotiated by the Executive and passed through two-thirds of the Senate), the mishandling of a natural disaster followed by an outright refusal to rebuild a major American city while we were wasting money arming an Iraqi army that quickly disintegrated into a civil war.

Oh yes, the previous administration did a lot of things. And each thing they did seemed to be worse than the last. It seemed that every week there was another wholesale attack on an America that stands for Americans, our freedoms, civil liberties, pluralistic society and the ability of Americans to achieve a standard of living better than that of our parents.

If you want to hear complaints about this administration from me, I would ask that the President fulfill his promise to close Guantanamo Prison, the US's only Constitution-Free zone. He also passed the Republican plan for increasing US citizens' access to healthcare. Tested by Republican Governor Romney in Massachusetts and first proposed by Newt Gingrich as an answer to Hillary Clinton's proposal for a single-payer system, it is flawed but will never be fixed as long as there is a Republican majority in either house of Congress. The passage of this Republican plan by Democrats was a futile attempt to get at least one Republican to vote in favor of the plan. They ought to have simply passed a Single-Payer system—it would have invited fewer lawsuits.

But to claim that this President has done nothing assumes stupidity in the listener. This President has done more for the American people than the previous President. After all, if this President hasn't done anything, then why oppose everything he has done, claim that he has done illegal things and try to undo legislation that he has passed?