The sands of time slip away. The days dwindle down to a precious few. Whatever your favorite allusion to the inexorable march of time (that’s a good one, too), realize this good news: after tomorrow, our TVs will finally be freed from the scourge of political advertising insulting our intelligence with lie upon lie for another year. Or so. The other good news is this: tomorrow is the day things can start to change, if we choose to take action to make it happen. Tens of millions of American have already done so, and I’m looking forward to joining them tomorrow.
The latest polls, fallible though they are, carry strong hope that the wave of anti-Trump sentiment is still strong on the day before election day. Democrats across the country are expected to do well tomorrow, even in places (like my state of Texas) where they haven’t done well since even before we knew there was a thing called MAGA America.
If we’ve learned nothing else in the last ten years, we know that Donald Trump is a man who is used to getting his way and generally doesn’t let facts or history or even good sense get in the way of whatever it takes to scratch that itch. That includes going to court with the flimsiest of arguments demanding that “his judges” find a way around the plain meaning or intent of the law to clear a path for his self-aggrandizing plans. But remember, he’s losing in the courts (with only a few exceptions) and that losing streak is going strong. Our country’s judges – even many judges that Trump himself nominated to the bench – are doing their jobs and shooting down the shoddy motions from the government lawyers. For example, yesterday a federal judge threw out the Administration’s effort to block certification of the vote for U.S. senator in Alaska – but only if the incumbent Republican were to lose! It’s gotten so ridiculous that last week a federal judge ordered a “formal inquiry into potential misconduct by Trump Administration officials in the lawsuit over East Potomac Park” after Department of Justice lawyers urged the judge to ignore the president’s own statements about plans for the golf course there, statements that directly contradicted those that the DOJ lawyers made in court. (Yes, your honor, please ignore that man behind the curtain; who you gonna believe, me or the president of the United States?)
There seems to be a reasonable chance that tomorrow’s election could swing control of both houses of Congress to the Democrats. If so, we can expect that next year we will see the end of the “yessir, anything you want” Congress that Republicans have given us the past two years, a barely-there branch of government that has utterly and deplorably given up its Constitutional responsibility of checks and balances. With a Democrat-controlled House and/or Senate, it’s likely that the worst intentions of TFG will finally run into some Congressional resistance to back up that already coming from the Judicial Branch. I like the sound of that.
Speaking of sound, I saw a great thing on television last week. It was a very brief message in the credits of a broadcast network comedy show where the executive producer likes to sound off; it struck me as a smart call to arms before this critical election, so I took a picture of the screen.
