Comment on Ferguson

Trust is the Glue of Life – Stephen Covey

The View from the Middle

I hate to launch my column with an often-derided cliché, but some of my best friends are black, and that has always been the case.  It could be my upbringing or my life long love of sports, but I count this collegial cocktail as a real blessing in my life.

So in the wake of Ferguson, it was natural to me to reach out to my friends to get their take, and what I got back surprised me and educated me.  What I accepted as fact was questioned by my comrades who suggested that law enforcement and judicial representatives were simply lying.

And these men are hardly revolutionary anarchists.  They are solid citizens, family men, businessmen and thoughtful people.  They have just had different life experiences than I have.  Each talked about bogus traffic stops and or harsh treatment by law enforcement throughout their lives. 

These life experiences have destroyed the trust they have in our legal system.  To quote Benjamin Watson in his current viral Facebook post, “Power is a responsibility not a weapon to brandish.”  This reminded me of the importance of “trust” in life in general, but particularly in government.  When we feel we can’t trust the people we elect or whose salaries we pay, they lose their legitimacy.  For my friends it is law enforcement and for me it becomes the government, especially in Washington.

So, when Hillary Clinton said, “What difference does it make” during her testimony on Benghazi in front of Congress, she couldn’t have been more clueless, in my opinion.  The outrage about Benghazi goes beyond the deaths of four loyal and brave Americans who were just doing their jobs.  The anger is driven by the idea that our government was simply not honest with us.

This is just one more thing that dilutes our trust in government.  Let’s add ObamaCare on to the “lack of confidence” pile that our government is creating.  First, the President earned the lie of the year by Politifact for his promise that, “if you like your plan, you can keep it.”  Then we have promise after promise being broken.  Premiums have NOT come down.  Deductibles HAVE gone up.  And the cost of ObamaCare is now nearly three times what was originally promised.

If all of that was not enough to earn every American’s skepticism, enter Jonathan Gruber.  This MIT professor was unquestionably a key architect of ObamaCare, no matter what Nancy Pelosi says.  In a recent lapse into honesty, this arrogant elitist informed Americans that the law had been devised to intentionally mislead not only average Americans, who he called “stupid”, but also the supposedly non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.

All of these acts of deception, arrogance and outright prejudice erode the faith of the public in our government.  Every police officer that pulls over a black man for some phony violation contributes to this erosion.  Every politician who abuses the truth to get elected has violated his or her fundamental pledge and contributes to our country’s overall mistrust of government.

This accumulation of mistrust in the government has been a team effort, and reversing it will take the same. 

Part of the fix is making every police department look like the communities they protect.  Ferguson is project #1.  Why are there only three black police officers out of the 50 in Ferguson despite the fact that Ferguson is 67% African American?  And don’t tell me you don’t have enough applicants.  You just need to try harder.

The next part of the fix will certainly be the most difficult.  We need our politicians to tell the truth.  We are far from that today, but the good news is that we control their fate with our votes.  We need to pay attention.  We need to become informed voters, and we need to vote the lying manipulators out of office.  But a recent development gives me some hope in this area.

Charles Shumer, democratic Senator from New York, just admitted publicly that focusing on ObamaCare back in 2009 was a mistake.  He was not saying that healthcare didn’t have issues that needed to be addressed; he was just saying that it should not have been “the” priority at that time.  Specifically, he said, “that was not the job we were hired to fix.”  I agree with him.

I’m sure he will be attacked, especially by members of his own caucus, but for me, his honesty gives me new hope that our government can work.  It is this kind of veracity that can begin to rebuild the trust that we so desperately need in our government.  I applaud you, Chuck.

Dead Men Tell No Tales, But Often Vote

Dead Men Tell No Tales, But Often Vote

The View from the Middle

Your vote, is it a right, a privilege or a responsibility?  The short answer is “yes”, it is all three.  It is a right that is guaranteed to all citizens by the 15^th, 19^th, 24^th and 26^th amendments to the constitution.  It is a privilege that we are all blessed with because we were born in a country that honors individual rights over the whims of the government (at least for now).  And, it is a responsibility that our founders expected us to exercise with thoughtful wisdom.

But a right can be abused.  We all have the right to free speech, but that right can be violated by, for example, yelling “fire” in a crowded theatre, according to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.  You can breach your right to vote by voting more than once in any particular election.  And you ask, how big of a problem is this?  It depends on whom you ask.

There are some that say that voter fraud is as rare as getting struck by lightening.  Of course, these people, who include our Attorney General Eric Holder, point to the sparse number of successful prosecutions for voter fraud in the United States.  This does not capture the incidents of voter fraud, however, it only captures the ones who have been caught.  Others will suggest that those caught represent a small fraction of actual violations.  We miss many abusers because we simply are not looking for them. 

A recent study in North Carolina found over 35 thousand people registered to vote in two states.  They found 13 thousand dead people still on the voting register and 81 deceased people who actually voted in the last election.  Other studies have suggested that the real voter fraud occurs through abuse of absentee ballots.  Obviously, there is more abuse than our government leaders think, which is why 74% of Americans are in favor of using voter ID laws to protect the sanctity of the ballot.

While I don’t think voter impersonation is a big source of the fraud, I think the requirement of voter ID would be an important step in winning back confidence in our voting process.  Almost 90% of Americans already have the required photo ID’s via their driver’s license or student ID cards, etc.

We need to insure, however, that every person can acquire these ID’s with a minimal effort.  I support the proposal that the state or federal government make these available for free.  Now, you all know that I am not a big money spender, but this is one example of an expense that I would support in order to mend the mistrust our voters have in our electoral process.

Everyone in this country has to provide a photo ID to buy alcohol or cigarettes or to apply for welfare or food stamps (among other things).   Isn’t the right to vote worth the minimal effort to go to the DMV or other governmental office and apply for a free voter ID card?

A life rule is, “when there is NO cost to something, that thing soon becomes worthless.”  Is that the way we want people to think about their vote?

And all this could be done without suppressing one vote.  The Government Accountability Office (GAO) looked at 10 studies of voter ID laws.  Five of those studies showed no difference in turnout.  Four studies showed a minimal impact, which could have been caused by other things, and one actually showed an increase in turnout.  With a little education and effort we could improve the integrity of our electoral process AND even expand voter turnout.  That is truly my wish!

We also need harsher penalties for voter fraud (a $200 fine is just not sufficient).  Make that fine $10,000 and we might have an impact on non-citizen voting and absentee ballot abuse, which is where the real fraud action is. 

Finally, we must take our responsibility to vote seriously.  We must understand the issues and know the positions of our candidates on each of them.  Thomas Jefferson warned that one of the greatest threats to the Republic and to liberty itself was “an uninformed electorate”. 

The Founder Fathers expected “the people” to be the ultimate check on government abuse.  They were depending on us to be “the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”  Let’s not let them or ourselves down.

So, VOTE this Tuesday.  It is your right, privilege and responsibility.  But first, study the real positions of the candidates on the issues.  Look at both sides of the political equation.  There is wisdom and extremism on both sides.  Sift through the mountains of negative commercials and personal attacks to find the crumbs of truth that will help you make your decision.

And remember, “Freedom is lost gradually from an uninterested, uniformed and uninvolved people”…Thomas Jefferson.