Take Back Our Democracy? Voting In The 2022 Midterms Is Vital!

By Donald A. Collins | 5 December 2021
Church and State

(Credit: YouTube / screengrab)

The top righthand front page Sunday December 5 NY Times story entitled “GOP Voting Bills Raises The Stakes For Races In 2022” sent chills done my spine.

As its author Nick Corasanti tells us “A new wave of Republican legislation to reshape the nation’s electoral system is coming in 2022.”

You will want to read the full article here.

But make no mistake, the GOP drive was partly the result of Trump’s continuing claims of voter fraud on November 3, which have been repeatedly disproved, but is still believed by most of his core supporters undermining the belief in our democratic institutions.

The morally disgraced GOP leadership in Congress is happy to politically use Trump’s lies and residual political power to enact new voting regulations in 19 states already with other states preparing to follow.

As the Times article notes, “in many places Democrats will be largely powerless to push back at the state level, where they remain overmatched in Republican legislatures”.

In short, challenging an electoral system which provided the safest Presidential election in our history sounds eerily like the upcoming politically possible revocation of Roe/Casey now nearly 50 years in place by the Trump packed Supreme Court despite the treasured upholding of prescience called Stare decisis!

With Trump and the non-governing GOP doing everything possible to keep freedoms from functioning in our fragile democracy, taking away the right to vote from our poorer citizens could easily and autocratically change power for decades in our next election.

The fact that Trump and his cohorts could sully our republic and get away with it could in the midst of our deep political disarray might embolden Putin to attack in Ukraine and Chi to try to annex Taiwan in a time when our military resolve after our Afghanistan withdrawal might be weak. Hope not.

But as I keep suggesting, it is now imperative that major world leaders widely heed and act upon the unfolding global crises about climate, starvation, pollution, and governmental breakdowns in so many countries.

These huge immigrations of desperate people to richer nations will only lessen with help from us and other rich nations if more of these indigenous populations are to be encouraged to remain at home, which many would opt to do.

The wish for cheap immigrant labor has proven dangerous which only can be solved with enlightened legislation in the US which I do not see coming anytime soon.

What could help but has little hope of happening would be a series of Marshall Plan aid programs to help many poorer nations, instigated by the world’s superpowers, fostered by the UN as were climate negotiations. The problem remains for getting wide superpower leadership recognition of these urgently looming crises.

Historically the world’s national miasma for such positive efforts has failed because nations have only seen treating their parochial national interests.

The Marshall Plan after WWII was a notable exception, when we saw our best interests served by that effort. As my recent book entitled “What Can Be Done Now To Save Habitable Life On Planet Earth? Leaders Commit to Reduce Human Population”, which can be found on Kindle and read at no cost, argues human habitability on earth to be maintained must see efforts of global cooperation.

Surely many sophisticated smart leaders around the world must be fully aware of that fact.

Is the human species going to behave like the myth of lemmings rushing to the sea? Read here that myth.

How reminiscent is of the Trumpians to embrace his myths of fake news or cajoling with his behavior the 55 million of us who see no need to get vaccinated and wear masks.

So now the urgency of solving our bigger looming global problems worldwide, beyond the positive agreement by most of us for getting the world vaccinated, continues to be largely ignored.

We are not alone among nations that own political trend today is toward malaise and uncertainty.

Is the inattention of so many of us as to how our democracy should and could work that puts our democracy and our world in such peril? The failure to educate too many of us has led to this myopia by too many of us.

Voting in peril? Indeed. And your vote gets crucial. A vital first step toward solving the other crises noted above would require funding Build Back Better to make up for decades of indifference for our poorest and least powerful citizens.

Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC, has spent over 40 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of “From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013”, “Trump Becoming Macbeth: Will our democracy survive?”, “We Humans Overwhelm Our Earth: 11 or 2 Billion by 2100?” and “What Can Be Done Now to Save Habitable Life on Planet Earth?: Leaders Commit to Reduce Human Population”.

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