Our government is failing us. We can rightly place a good deal of the blame on Mitch McConnell and the senate Republicans who orchestrated the sham impeachment trial of President Trump, refusing to allow any witness testimony or documental evidence. While the outcome would most likely have remained the same, the American people had a right to see and hear all the evidence. In truth, the trial was a cover-up and the Republicans should be ashamed of themselves.

However, there’s plenty of blame to go around for our deteriorating democracy. Just last month we marked the tenth anniversary of the infamous Citizens United decision which opened the floodgates of dark money into our political system. We can thank the U.S. Supreme Court for that punch in the gut to our democratic principles.

But don’t think it’s all a conservative Republican conspiracy that’s killing our democratic republic. While President Barack Obama’s policies saved the country from near economic collapse, his refusal to prosecute the Wall Street bandits who brought down the economy effectively gave the perpetrators of the 2008 Great Recession the greenlight to do it again. Consequently, many blue-collar Obama voters turned to Trump in 2016, believing he would clean up the Washington swamp and protect them from further Wall Street corruption.

And, don’t forget President Bill Clinton, who abandoned FDR’s Glass-Steagall Act, which had put a firewall between commercial and investment banking for some 66 years. When Clinton agreed to take down that wall, he opened the door wide to overzealous investing. This led to the fraudulent Wall Street practices which, in large part, contributed to the 2008 economic collapse.

Al Gore and the Democratic Party also played a role in our national downfall when they conceded the 2000 election and failed to support the Congressional Black Caucus’s legitimate challenge to Florida’s fraudulent Electoral College delegation. We paid for Gore’s lack of bold leadership and the Democrats’ timidity with eight years of George Bush and the disastrous Iraq War.

Nevertheless, there is a fundamental difference between these major political decisions. While the Democrats have made serious political and policy miscalculations, their inclination has been to put country over party. Gore conceded the 2000 election for the good of the country. Obama focused on restoring the economy rather than punishing the bankers, believing it was for the common good.

Republicans, on the other hand, often favor party over country in their continuous onslaught to control the government. The Republican senate’s sham impeachment trial protecting their party’s president from the country’s right to the truth is just the latest illustration.  Moreover, the Republican Party has been stealing our elections through voter suppression, voter registration purges and other election manipulations for more than 100 years. Their thirst for power increasingly takes precedence over upholding fundamental American principles of fairness and equality upon which our nation was founded.

For example, in 2019 alone, the Republican-controlled state of Ohio purged nearly 500,000 voters, most of them suspected Democrats. The Democratic Party failed to prevent the purge, and is on course to lose this critical swing state yet again. According to Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman in Truthout (See https://truthout.org/articles/election-theft-is-a-120-year-tradition-lets-end-it-this-year/), “the corporate Democrats did win the presidency in 2000, 2004 and 2016. Each time they walked away without a word (except to blame the left). The Gore, Kerry and Clinton campaigns all were shafted by the GOP stripping the voter rolls and flipping electronic vote counts. But instead of fighting to change the basic nature of our electoral system, they have blamed the left — and left the machinery of theft in place. So the same pattern of fraud and deceit that cost the Democrats three of the last five presidential elections could strike again in 2020.

“Put simply, since the theft of Florida 2000, the Democrats have failed to protect the vote, failed to provide reliable voting machines and failed to abolish the Electoral College — all of which could enthrone Donald Trump in 2020….

“Officially decided by 537 votes, the 2000 election in Florida was turned by Gov. Jeb Bush’s stripping of more than 90,000 people allegedly with felony convictions (the vast majority of them people of color) from the voter rolls, disenfranchising them using a law from the former Confederacy…. But Ralph Nader is still being blamed for the Democrats’ defeat.”

We must not allow this to happen again. Join the grassroots movement at the Transformative Justice Coalition, vote.org, and rockthevote.org fighting to protect our 2020 elections.  If our democratic republic is to survive, it is up to all of us to ensure that this movement succeeds.

Bruce Berlin, J.D.

A retired, public sector ethics attorney, Berlin is the author of Breaking Big Money’s Grip on America (See breakingbigmoneysgrip.com.), the founder of New Mexicans for Money Out of Politics, a former U.S. Institute of Peace fellow, and the founder and former executive director of The Trinity Forum for International Security and Conflict Resolution. He can be reached at breakingbigmoneysgrip@gmail.com.

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