If you, like I, supported Christine Blasey Ford, where do we go from here? I believe the answer is to follow in her courageous footsteps and join her and call upon our own civic duty.
As painful as this current, disgraceful, low point in American democracy can feel, it also ignites in me a deeper determination to fully commit to taking the modern, algorithmically precisioned, gerrymandered House of Representatives from the conservatives and turning it blue in the 2016 election. Also we can commit to sustaining that effort to keep it blue for many decades to come. We are the majority party and it is time to act on that basis.
The House is the only truly democratic branch of government we have. Once the House is secured, we can begin to reconstruct our country in more democratic ways. We can change the rules and operations of the non-democratic Senate — where two Senators from Wyoming (who represent about 579,000 people) have equal voice to the two Senators from California (who represent 38 million people). Truly, the framers of the Constitution would not envision nor support such a non-representative system. Just as, I believe, they never envisioned nor supported private citizens walking around with AK-47s.
We can also modify the operation of the Electoral College by eliminating the persistent pattern of multiple states’ voter suppression actions by establishing an effective National Voter Commission to create appropriate rules and laws governing national presidential elections. This Commission would be responsible for ensuring that all legitimate voters are eligible to exercise their right to vote in the national elections. While states may have authority governing elections for state offices, states have no inherent authority to determine who votes in national presidential elections.
The time to reconstruct our democracy is NOW. It is, as Christine Blasey Ford demonstrated to us, a call to embrace our own civic duty.
Alan Kanner
Amherst