The wraith of Hurricane Ida, the stealth destruction of Roe v Wade, and the 3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” infrastructure reconciliation bill are putting significant pressure on the politics of President Joe Biden and the U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. But for the survival of American democracy, Biden and Schumer must put politics aside choose wisely and make passage of America’s most consequential infrastructure law the Senate’s 1st priority.
For both President Biden and Senate Leader Schumer the return of the U.S. Senate next week will force some hard decisions to be made. Hurricane Ida wreaked tremendous infrastructure destruction and death from New Orleans to New York. For most of last week, the entire city of New Orleans and large parts of Louisiana was without electricity. Most of the electricity has been restored in New Orleans but an estimated 400,000 people throughout the state are still without it, and according to the Louisiana Department of Health Ida has killed 13 people.
At one point Hurricane Ida winds were so strong they reversed the flow of water in the Mississippi River near New Orleans. As Ida moved north out of Louisiana it was downgraded to a tropical storm. Unfortunately, the downgrade did not downgrade the death and infrastructure destruction. Ida as a tropical storm caused catastrophic levels of rainfall in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. It triggered the first flash flood emergency ever issued for New York City. Ida caused the deaths of 23 people in New Jersey, 12 people in New York, 5 in Pennsylvania, and one each in Connecticut and Maryland for a total of 40 lives lost.
According to the New York Police Department, one flooding victim was just 2 years old, “We saw a horrifying storm last night, unlike anything we’ve seen before,” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said. New Jersey. Gov. Phil Murphy tweeted that of the 23 deaths in his state, most were people who “got caught in their vehicles by flooding and were overtaken by the water. Our prayers are with their family members.”
The past lying stealing and cheating by Senate Republicans has scored yet another immoral Republican victory and unfortunately, it proves that the cancer of political corruption has grown far beyond Republican-controlled state legislatures or a Republican-controlled U.S. House or Senate, the corruption has now reached the U.S. Supreme Court!!!
5 of the 6 Republican-appointed Supreme Court Justices refusal to block a Texas abortion statute that bans the procedure as early as six weeks into pregnancy, justifies recent calls for Supreme Court legislative reforms, proved that they have a biased judicial respect for the rule of law, and have no more legal or moral integrity than a conservative ideological biased Republican politician. They verified their judicial corruption by ruling that a clearly unconstitutional law that denies the constitutional right of all women in Texas to an abortion could remain in effect. The 5 corrupt justices issued their majority opinion in the secrecy of midnight with no written legal rationale for doing so. Because it’s pretty hard for a current corrupt Supreme Court to legally justify denying a right that an uncorrupt Supreme Court granted American women 50 years ago.
Democrats 3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” infrastructure reconciliation bill got a major endorsement for immediate passage by Hurricane Ida. “Global warming is upon us, when you get all the changes that we have seen in weather, that’s not a coincidence. It’s going to get worse and worse and worse unless we do something about it,” Sen. Schumer said in response to the infrastructure damage done in his home state of New York. After viewing Ida’s damaged infrastructure in New Jersey and New York Tuesday President Biden declared climate change had reached condition “code red.” “The threat is here. It is not getting any better,” Biden said in New York. “The question is can it get worse. We can stop it from getting worse.”
The high early voting turnout rate is 1 of 2 reasons why every Republican-controlled state legislature in America drastically reduced the number of days for early voting
The city of New Orleans provided proof that President Biden is correct about the ability of an infrastructure bill to stop it from getting worse. While there was massive flooding infrastructure failure throughout Louisiana the one dry spot was the Hurricane Katrina flood-famed city of New Orleans. The $14.5 billion flood-protection system built around New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina stopped water from Hurricane Ida from pushing past, overtopping, and prevented any type of structural failure to any of the 192 miles of flood barriers that make up the system, according to the Flood Protection Authority, leaving New Orleans flood-wise almost as dry as the Sahara Desert.
Hurricane Ida has shown how desperately America needs to update, rebuild, and in some cases replace old infrastructure. The Supreme Court has shown signs that the judicial infrastructure at the Supreme Court level is desperately in need of infrastructure reform. And the city of New Orleans preventing a Category 4 Hurricane from flooding its borders demonstrates how throwing money at America’s traditional infrastructure needs through the Democrat’s 3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” bill could actually work.
This is the 2nd reason Republicans drastically reduced the number of early voting days
As paramount as climate change infrastructure and the infrastructure reform of the Supreme Court is to American life, and even with the proof from New Orleans on how economically sound passage of the 3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” legislation will be to the safety infrastructure of American life, it all means nothing and ceases to exist without the voting rights infrastructure of American democracy which was just hit with Category 4 Hurricane Big Steal on January 6th!!! Fortunately, the storm, wind, and flood barriers of American democracy held firm with only a few hours delay in completing the certification of America’s one-person-one-vote democratic process to elect the President of the United States. But unfortunately, Hurricane Big Steal did inflict enough damage to create huge foundation cracks in the voting rights infrastructure of American democracy.
The first voting rights infrastructure cracks appeared in Georgia and Arizona, the 2 states that Hurricane Big Steal’s storm winds and floodwaters unsuccessfully attempted to breach before its failed breach of the nation’s capital on January 6th. Hurricane Big Steel started in Georgia with 3 needless recounts, 1 by hand, of each ballot cast in the Georgia 2020 election, and when a sitting President of the United States, Donald Trump, tried to convince, cajole, threaten, and emotionally blackmail Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, to change the Georgia 2020 vote totals for President of the United States. Trump’s Big Steal breach attempt failed because Georgia’s law barriers held back the vote theft Hurricane, but it left a HUGE crack in the voting rights infrastructure of Georgia’s one-person-one-vote-counted democracy.
This is the reason why some Republican-controlled state legislatures have limited mail-in ballots to those who have a written medical excuse while other Republicans have created very stringent signature and ID requirements in order to receive a mail-in ballot
A huge crack that grew to allow the voting rights infrastructure in Georgia to crumble into dust. When the Georgia state legislature passed the falsely named Election Integrity Act of 2021. A new law that gave Georgia’s Republican-controlled state legislature the authority to do what Ga. Secretary of State Raffensperger apologized in 2020 to then-President Trump for not having the legal power to do, change future Georgia vote totals legally by disqualifying any legally cast Georgia vote for any reason Republicans deem necessary.
After hovering in Georgia, Hurricane Big Steel moved west to Arizona, where Arizona’s infrastructure law barriers held firm albeit with cracks to its voting rights infrastructure that encouraged Republicans there to follow Georgia’s lead. The Republican-controlled Arizona state legislature like Georgia passed new vote theft and voter suppression legislation. Started multiple recounts of the state’s largest precinct of Arizona black and brown voters, which has since morphed into the current never-ending fraudit that’s in search of vote fraud that does not exist. As Hurricane Big Steel left and headed for Washington D.C. where it was finally shut down with the failure of the January 6th insurrection, it left behind in Arizona a tropical storm of fraudulent investigations in search of non-existent vote fraud.
Arizona’s tropical storm of fraudulent investigations is now spreading to other states. In Wisconsin, the Republican-controlled House under the leadership of House Speaker Robin Vos approved $676,000 in taxpayer funding for a 2020 election investigation led by a former state Supreme Court justice. Pennsylvania State Senate President Jake Corman said in an interview “Hopefully the results in Arizona will be a springboard for us.” He appointed the Chairman of the State Senate’s Intergovernmental Operations Committee to investigate the 2020 election. A Corman staffer said the investigation would be similar to Arizona’s two-pronged approach which included hiring an outside vendor to look at ballots and voting equipment; and a second prong that would investigate the decision-making of the Pennsylvania Department of State during the election.
Since so many people all over America turned out to vote in 2020 Republicans are using all their political power to make sure that all voting precincts in America where Democrats and people of color vote look like this
The Big Steal tropical storm of fraudulent investigations spreading to other states means the storm has the potential to become a Category 4 Hurricane again. A Brennan Center for Justice analysis confirms that already in 2021 18 states have enacted 30 laws restricting access to voting. Repairing the foundation cracks in America’s voting rights infrastructure and strengthening it against stronger future Hurricanes must be the U.S. Senate’s 1st priority when it returns next week.
Restoring and strengthening America’s voting rights infrastructure legislation must be passed in the U.S. Senate before legislation to protect America from future climate change weather damage, before any Roe v Wade legislative fix, before legislation to reform the Supreme Court, before any build back better infrastructure legislation is passed, and before legislation to raise America’s debt ceiling is passed. Because American democracy is on the brink of becoming American autocracy!!! If Hurricane Big Steal was to reappear today and hit Georgia and Arizona tomorrow, Republicans in those 2 states now have the legal power to grant Trump, what he asked for in 2020, a stolen election victory regardless of how many people voted for or against him.
It’s time for President Biden and Senator Schumer to finally step up boldly and replace their TIMID words of support for voting rights in America, with true backbone and strength of conviction. They must heed the following slightly paraphrased spirit of American OG founding father Thomas Paine who professed: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods, and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM and VOTING RIGHTS should not be highly rated.”
Biden and Schumer‘s failure to make restoring, protecting, and strengthening American democracy’s one-person-one-vote-counted voting rights infrastructure the U.S. Senate’s 1st priority, means climate change policy, Supreme Court reforms, build back better infrastructure, keeping Democratic Party control of the U.S. House and Senate and a 2nd Joe Biden administration will all crash and burn as casualties of Republican Party autocracy.