September 23, 2017
Last night we were once again forced to confront the dispiriting reality that our country has elected a President with utter contempt for the Constitution he took an oath to uphold. Trump yearns for the ability to punish those who insist on exercising their Constitutional rights and refuse to slavishly indulge in empty, jingoistic rituals. In the midst of a bizarre rally in support of embattled Republican Alabama Senator, Luther Strange, Trump ranted that if any football players had the gall to protest during the National Anthem, his buddies, the team owners, should “get that son of a bitch off the field,” and fire him. After eight months, we can hardly pretend to be shocked, since this diatribe is consistent with his administration’s posture that people of color are not entitled to equal protection under the law. Every appointment and executive order, from rescinding DACA to the Muslim Ban, is designed to codify that view.
As serious as these attempts to silence prominent athletes are, we are at risk of overlooking even broader attempts to silence us all that are flying under the radar. During the Friday afternoon news dump, we learned that 21 states were the victims of Russian attempts to hack their election systems. The swing states of Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania; perpetual swing state, Florida and the most populous state, California were among the twenty-one states targeted. Although the federal government has had this information since June, DHS just disclosed it to the states yesterday, less than two months prior to Election Day. (Source: “10 Months After Election Day, Feds Tell States More About Russian Hacking,” by Pam Tessler, NPR, WNYC Radio, 9/22/17). Although we have been told that the hacking efforts were unsuccessful, we should demand to know what steps are being taken at the federal, state and local level to safeguard our election systems. Until we have a satisfactory answer, we should insist on paper ballots that are hand-counted, so that we’re not sitting ducks for whatever chicanery Putin’s programmers and their Republican confederates have in store for us this cycle.
We should also be paying close attention to the upcoming Supreme Court case of Gil v. Whitford, which challenges partisan gerrymandering. Consider the underlying facts of this case. During Wisconsin’s 2010 redistricting, Republicans engaged in a secretive process that resulted in such a lopsided partisan advantage that Republicans could end up with 54% of the seats in the state legislature with only 48% of the vote (Source: “Bringing Whitford Into Focus,” Thomas Wolf, SCOTUSBlog, 8/8/17). In this era of extreme polarization, partisan affiliation with the Republican Party has unfortunately become more than a mere difference of opinion on fiscal responsibility and foreign policy. Partisan identification as a Republican has become a proxy for a retrograde agenda that seeks to subjugate and punish people of color, LGBT people and women. It may seem hyperbolic but the outcome of Gil v. Whitford could have a dramatic impact on our continued existence as a representative democracy. So, by all means, we should express outrage about Trump’s attempts to intimidate Colin Kaepernick, Steph Curry and other professional athletes into silence, but we had better not take our eyes off the ball.