The Republican Party has not accepted the results of the 2020 election and the traditional “peaceful transfer of power” may never happen. Not good, folks.
The hilarious legal escapades of the Trump team seem unlikely to reverse the results. A Beltway veteran like James Baker might have got the case sent to the Supreme Court. Unfortunately for Trump, his lawyer is Rudy Giuliani. The fact that A.G. Barr is cutting him loose is the best sign that the party leadership have decided to kick Trump to the curb, concerned about the Georgia Senate runoff.
However, the template has now been set for future Republican lawfare coups to seize state power. We must fireproof the political system against another brazen attack like this. Burn the Republican MSM media lifeboats heading off SS Trump. We must make the Republican Party pay a steep political price for this banana republic tinpot half-assed coup attempt.
If you believe that the problem is just Trump, and not the Republican Party, then you are part of the problem. The base partisan Republican believes that if they can’t govern this country, then no one can. Currently, about 75 percent of Republican voters believe that the election was stolen and will consider Biden as illegitimate from Day One, as they did Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. That’s who they are. There must be no “next time.”
What most well-meaning liberals have a hard time understanding is that the core Republican MAGA cult members are dominator personality types with a rigid, punitive, authoritarian ideology. They despise any attempts at negotiation and refuse to grant their political counterparts even the decency of respect. They understand only the language of winners and losers. The only way they will ever negotiate is with a boot on their necks.
We will have to repeatedly defeat, marginalize, and stigmatize the Republican Party. Lather, rinse, repeat.
We need tough love for the Republican coup plotters and their enablers in the Senate, the House, and in the right-wing media empire. We need to prosecute the most egregious Trump Administration cronies. We will need to un-follow MAGA relatives, redefine our friendship circles, and protect our cultural spaces. Make America governable again.
On the local front, the passage of Measure W has assured the regional conservation groups that the precedent of the first renewal of a historical UGB (Urban Growth Boundary) with the standard twenty-year sunset will not be subject to amendment. Given the decades of work by advocacy groups like Greenbelt Alliance and Sonoma County Conservation Action to create the first generation of UGB’s, starting with Petaluma and being adopted countywide, this is not a policy lock-box they want tampered with, for good measure.
The real core of the minor local debate around Measure W, when the static is filtered out, is a concern regarding the dire and long-standing critical need for much more workforce housing stock. That is not a problem that can be resolved on a city or even the county level. It will require decisive federal support for state initiatives that can be awarded to counties to implement in collaboration with the cities. You can’t build paradise on a parcel. Now that the distraction of the election is removed, we need to restate the problem and renew our efforts to enact “Housing for All.”
Thank you, this summed it up better than anything I have read to date. Also your statement about housing. We are looking in all the wrong places to figure this out. The federal and state governments must create a real workable plan to both create affordable housing and create subsidy programs to help people buy homes or pay the rent. But, I do also believe that the city and county could mandate that more of TOT be used to create and subsidize housing. Plus perhaps another tax on tourism related revenue. And I say this even though both of my small businesses are tourist related.