What hasn't changed?
- Marie Laure
- Jul 29, 2024
- 4 min read
What a whirlwind of change we are witnessing. When the time is right, things happen. Some Eastern traditions would call it the "auspicious time"; others might say, in "God's time". Eastern or Western points of view in this case amount to the same ideology that things move whenever greater forces are at work. Something is clearly at work, no matter how you look at it. With 100 days to go, change is breathing new life into the upcoming US Presidential election. Seeing new faces, it's easy to think that everything has changed and that we've turned a corner, no worries. But, look beneath the surface to see a whole 'nother story.
There has been zero change in the past week, nor will there be in the next four months to the hard right's agenda to end abortions; protect guns; deport migrants; ban books; eliminate LGBTQ+. Their message is loud and clear. They have written a manifesto, Project 2025, a mega 900-plus page document is an attempt to rewrite the United States Constitution. A side by side comparison of a small excerpt proves the point:
Chapter Two of Project 2025*
The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power— including power currently held by the executive branch—to the American people. Success in meeting that challenge will require a rare combination of boldness and self-denial: boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will and self-denial to use the bureaucratic machine to send power away from Washington and back to America’s families, faith communities, local governments, and states. Fortunately, a President who is willing to lead will find in the Executive Office of the President (EOP) the levers necessary to reverse this trend and impose a sound direction for the nation on the federal bureaucracy. The effectiveness of those EOP levers depends on the fundamental premise that it is the President’s agenda that should matter to the departments and agencies) that operate under his constitutional authority and that, as a general matter, it is the President’s chosen advisers who have the best sense of the President’s aims and intentions, both with respect to the policies he intends to enact and with respect to the interests that must be secured to govern successfully on behalf of the American people.
Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution:**
He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.
That's not all. There is also citizen's "call to action" wrapped in a "training" academy to prepare (?) for Day One:
The Presidential Administration Academy is a one-of-a-kind educational and skill-building program designed to prepare and equip future political appointees now to be ready on Day One of the next conservative Administration. This academy provides aspiring appointees with the insight, background knowledge, and expertise in governance to immediately begin rolling back destructive policy and advancing conservative ideas in the federal government.***
"Aspiring appointees . . ." Who might they be? A book published in 1955: They Thought They Were Free, The Germans ,1933-45 by Milton Mayer is a sobering look-back on the rise of Naziism under Hitler. The author interviewed ten former Nazis. He wanted to understand how ordinary, every day German people had done, or not done the unthinkable on their own, during the years leading to and including Hitler's reign of terror. More striking than the interviews themselves, is the foreword written by the author in which he spells out his own sense of what had gone so terribly wrong:
. . ."I would rather judge Germans than Americans. Now I see a little better how Nazism overcame Germany --not by attack from without or by subversion from within, but with a whoop and a holler. It was what most Germans wanted --or under pressure of combined reality and illusion, came to want. They wanted it; they got it; and they liked it.
I came back home a little afraid for my country, afraid of what it might want, and get, and like, under pressure of combined reality and illusion. I felt --and feel--that it was not German Man that I had met, but Man. He happened to be in Germany under certain conditions. He might be here, under certain conditions. He might, under certain conditions, be I.
If I--and my countrymen--ever succumbed to that concatenation of condition, no Constitution, no laws, no police, and certainly no army would be able to protect us from harm." ****
The race is on to protect ourselves against nefarious forces at work by lifting up the work and good will of the majority. We the people are here at this auspicious time in history. This is the time to add our voices and to take action to preserve and protect the Constitution of the United States of America as written. This is not going to be a "cakewalk".
****They Thought They Were Free, The Germans, 1933-45. Mayer.1955
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