by Pa Rock
Missourian
Congress meets today to formally accept the votes of the Electoral College and to declare Joe Biden the winner of last November's presidential election. It is a perfunctory meeting that usually draws only a minimum of press attention, but today's gathering will be different from similar events of the past. This time the country is dealing with a mentally impaired leader who refuses to accept the fact that he lost, and a divided Congress in which some members support challenging the process of democracy out of an abject fear of their party's leader, or out of fear of an under-educated constituency who may come after them in the next election if they don't drink Donald John Trump's kool-aid.
Missouri currently sends a total of ten individuals to Washington DC to represent our state in the legislative branch of government: two U.S. Senators and eight Members of the House of Representatives. As of this morning our state's delegation to the Capitol is split evenly on the matter of certifying the results of the Electoral College count and the election of Joe Biden as President of the United States.
One of our two GOP United States Senators, Ol' Roy Blunt, will vote to affirm Biden's election, and the other GOP Senator, Josh Hawley, will rise and challenge the outcome. Blunt, the Senate's current "Republican Policy Committee Chairman" and a member of the Republican leadership in the Senate, has spent much of his two terms in the Senate fluffing Mitch McConnell's seat cushions and is unlikely to ever cross Mitch politically if there is anyway to avoid it. Also, Blunt's wife is a high profile Washington DC lobbyist and all of his grown children are lobbyists - and Ol'Roy is unlikely to ever do anything that would rattle the US Chamber of Commerce - like engage in open sedition.
But Senator Hawley has only been in DC for two years, and he has no compunctions at all about rattling political cages. Hawley was the first member of the Senate to break ranks with McConnel and announce that he would challenge to the election certification. He coughed up some malarkey about giving voice to a group of people whose concerns weren't being heard, even though record numbers of Americans went to their polling places in November and exercised their voices in the election. Once Hawley broke the dam in the Senate, twelve more senators quickly rushed to join him. Of these objectors to the process, Hawley and some of the others have obvious presidential ambitions of their own and seem to be consciously pandering to Trump's base.
Of Missouri's eight Members of the House of Representatives, two are Democrats and six are Republicans. As of this morning it appears that the two Democrats (from the urban areas of St. Louis and Kansas City), will support the Constitution as will two of the Republicans, but the other four announced in a press release this past weekend that they are not on board with supporting the will of the people. Those four, Representatives Jason Smith, Vicky Hartzler, Sam Graves, and Billy Long, issued a lengthy statement entitled "We Will Object."
In their manifesto the four, like Trump, imply that there were irregularities in the election without offering anything in the way of evidence. Basically the four, like Trump, just do not care for the way the election turned out. One must also suppose that they also feel compelled to object out of a fear as to what their largely rural electorates will do to them in two years if they fail to do everything conceivably possibly to keep Trump in power.
One of the election "abnormalities" that these geniuses cited was that Trump carried far more counties than Obama or Biden either one did. Trump won 2,586 counties, while Obama carried 873 counties and Biden carried only 527. Of course, what they neglect to point out is that the wide-ranging disparity in the amount of people living in various counties. Los Angeles County, California, has 10.4 million people, while the whole state of Missouri has only 6.1 million. Or compare Shannon County, Missouri, (which was the birthplace of one of our recent governors (Mel Carnahan) and the boyhood hoe of another (Bob Holden) with Los Angeles County. Both tally as "one county" according to the new math of Missouri's rural congressmen, but while LA County has over ten million people, Shannon County, Missouri, is home to just over eight thousand individuals! (8,189 in 2018). Los Angeles County, California, has a population equal to almost 1,270 Shannon Counties. Biden carried Los Angeles County, while Trump carried a bunch of counties on the order of Shannon.
Do the math.
And Jason Smith, who represents Shannon County in Congress, is a lawyer and a real estate broker who is smart enough to know that the number of counties won or lost in a presidential election doesn't mean diddly - it's just a distraction to sow confusion among his and Trump's noisy and gullible base.
This Missourian voted in the 2016 election and was very unhappy with the results, but I respected the democratic process - even with the Electoral College kink that put Trump in office. He was elected by our established rules, and I accepted that. Then I voted in the 2020 election and was pleased with that outcome - a wide popular vote victory for Biden and a substantial Electoral College win as well. But now that election is being challenged because the out-going president and his minions "feel" that it must have been dishonest.
Trump was put in power by a process outlined in the Constitution of the United States, and he is being taken out of power through the auspices of that same document. It's democracy in action, and it has kept our country together for more than two centuries. But now some of our elected officials want to change the rules and keep their man in power - even though the citizens of the United States turned him out of power by a margin of more than seven million votes.
Woe be to those who try to screw with our democracy. Josh Hawley, Jason Smith, Vicky Hartzler, Sam Graves, and Billy Long all need to sit down and shut the hell up. Their moaning and pissing goes against more than two hundred years of American democracy and bears a strong odor of sedition, and that is something that the citizens of the United States will never tolerate!
This isn't Russia - it's America. The people have spoken and their voices must be respected!
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