An Open-Letter to Speaker Ryan: The People's House, Really?

Dear Speaker Ryan:

      I was just gobsmacked when I heard you use the phrase “The People's House” in your scolding of the Democrats after their gun control sit-in.    Although, I took it as a minor miracle you didn't immediately choke on your words or that lightning didn't strike any where near you. Granted, I didn't check the D.C weather reports for that day, so it's possible the latter happened.

      How, I wondered, were you able to utter the phrase, “The People's House,” especially after criticizing Democrats for doing a sit-in because they wanted to debate what were, after all, fairly mild gun safety regulations with which the majority of Americans agree.

      According to a CBS News poll taken after Orlando, 57% of Americans now support a ban on assault weapons, a much more substantive proposal than anything the House Democrats were putting forth. One bill the Democrats wanted to debate was universal background checks, which a super majority of 89% of Americans support, including substantial majorities of Democrats and Republicans.

      How can you call it “The People's House” when no debate is allowed over what the vast majority of the people want? To call the present Republican House “The People's House” makes a mockery of the term. As Sean Illing pointed out in Salon in 2015, “the GOP’s control of Congress is . . . a scandal.” Obama beat Republican candidates twice “with more than 50 percent of the popular vote.” Also, “Democratic congressional candidates received 1.4 million more votes than their Republican opponents in 2012. And yet Republicans lost only eight seats that year. In a remotely representative system, such results would not be possible.”

      So what has happened in the world's last best hope? Your party, fueled by dark money, was extraordinarily successful at rigging the system in its favor by gerrymandering at the state level.

      As Illing explained, “Something like 55 percent of America’s congressional districts have been redrawn to favor the GOP, while a paltry 10 percent have been redrawn to favor Democrats. It’s difficult to overstate how anti-Democratic that is. Republicans have essentially short-circuited the Democratic process.”

      And how did your party do that? “They’ve used advanced technology and algorithms based on the most recent census data to redraw borders and create the safest districts possible.” So because of your party's rigging of the system, its influence in Congress is much greater than its support among the actual people of America.

      Another more interesting way to say it is that all of us have collectively been ratf**ked as Salon editor-in-chief David Daley puts it in his provocatively titled new book, RatF**ked: The True Story Behind The Secret Plan To Steal America's Democracy. Daley points out that because of your party's successful effort to subvert our democracy, blue states like Ohio and Pennsylvania that voted for Obama end up sending super majorities of Republicans to Congress, all because of gerrymandering. In Ohio's case, Republicans have a 12-4 advantage and Pennsylvania's delegation is 13-5 Republican.

      Of course, your party was only able to pull off this little coup because of dark money. In fact, if it weren't for a handful of right-wing billionaires, the Kochs, the Scaifes, the DeVoses, and a few others, your party's hard right turn over the past few years would never have been possible. They bought off media and universities. They established think tanks and a 24-7 365-days-a-year campaign mode that has transformed our nation for the worse.

      As described by Jane Mayer in her well-researched Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, the present-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell once explained to a college class that there are only three ingredients to building a political party: money, money, and money. So according to your counterpart in the Senate, such quaint notions as the people's will or the common good are not ingredients in building a political party. Good to know.

      After years and years of your party filling its coffers with dark money, while doing nothing, being the Party of No, you have the gall to lecture those who want to do the people's business. And to add insult to injury, you call your bought-and-paid-for House, “The People's House.”

      Given all the above, I don't know whether to call your utterance of the phrase “The People's House” chutzpah, delusional thinking, the meaningless mouthing of political platitudes, or just politics as usual as practiced in the second decade of the 21st century? Yet no matter what I call it, the people, whose well-being should be the primary objective of “The People's House,” will continue to be the losers.

What I Did Not Tell You

1

At the yellow house on our street –

the one where the son once sold crack

out of his converted garage window,

his driveway like a drivethru,

a couple weeks into your hospital stay,

his sister wandered off from bathing her 10-month old.

Maybe to text someone,

or probably to bitch about how absolutely bored

to tears she was, or maybe just to stream

a movie, quien sabe? To cut to the quick,

the 10-month old drowned

in just a tiny bit of soapy water.

The paramedics tried, but no.

All the family stood in their front yard

of hard dirt and high weeds –

and wailed and wailed.

2

It sucks to get old.

Our family doctor, around my age,

was going through something.

Dyed the gray out of his hair,

shaved his mustache,

pumped iron in earnest.

Even I noticed. Surreptitiously,

I checked his wedding band.

Still on, but just barely.

You see, he texted our 28-year old daughter,

nothing gross, no pics of his package,

just an “innocent” invite to coffee.

While you were splayed out

on yet another hospital bed,

I phoned him from your bathroom.

When I told him he lost us as patients,

he started crying, honest-to-God tears,

telling me how sorry he was

doing this when he knew

how afraid I was for you.

I will never forgive him those tears.

(Blogger's note: This poem was originally published in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review last month.)

A Husband's Case for Physician-assisted Suicide

      One March night I'll never forget, my wife grasped my hand, and looking up from her hospital bed, her eyes locked on mine, she begged me to sneak her pain meds from home. Tired of living with bone-numbing pain, she wanted to overdose on pain medication, so she could finally die in peace.

      It was heart wrenching, her sad eyes looking up at me, pleading. But I told her no. Then explained, as calmly as I could, that it wouldn't be good for our daughter to have one parent dead and the other in prison.

      Before she died this past July, my wife and I were blessed to live for 30 years our own goofy, old-movies, cheap-date life. She was one of the sweetest, most loving and giving people I've ever known.

      She certainly didn't deserve to suffer as she did her last six months – to endure eight ER visits, to be passed around like a hot potato by three different hospitals, two skilled nursing facilities, two long-term acute care hospitals, one rehab hospital – then to finally, end up in hospice.

      Take it from me, there's nothing at all edifying about suffering and certainly nothing edifying about watching the person you love most in the world suffer day in and day out for months on end.

      I refuse to put a cherry on top of it. My wife's last six months were a living hell. She bore the full brunt of a confluence of medical issues – chronic pain, a neurological disorder, an auto-immune disease, and inflammatory arthritis. In April her pain specialist straight-up admitted the strong narcotics he'd prescribed hadn't even come close to controlling her pain.

      The truth is, if my wife had had access to physician-assisted suicide, she'd have used it without hesitation. As early as February, she told me that she believed that death was now a better option than the agony she lived with every day.

      My wife was clearly at peace with ending her life, but in our home state of Texas, physician-assisted suicide was never an option. Partly, I blame the religious right's perverse and unscriptural indifference to the suffering of others, but I also blame the tyranny of the able-bodied, living forever in denial about death.

     When most people imagine death at all, they envision it will occur some time in the far, far future when they'll be surrounded, like some Norman Rockwell painting, by all their loved ones at home. But the truth is none of us knows when we will die or under what circumstances. Many, if not most of us, will die in some kind of hospital setting with tubes and electrodes stuck all over us.

      Yet I want someone to explain to me how is it right that if we have a pet that was as racked by pain as my wife was for months on end, I'd be considered cruel if I didn't bring it to the vet to be put down, but humans, no? They must suffer and suffer like my wife, who writhed in gut-wrenching pain nearly every one of her last 175 days.

      Belgium and Holland have physician-assisted suicide, as does Oregon, Montana, Vermont, Washington, and now, California. In fact, across the country, public opinion is swinging in the direction of physician-assisted suicide. According to Gallup, almost 70% of Americans now support it.

      But sadly, it is too late for my wife. I can never change the horror, the almost-constant terror of her last six months; though, believe me, every day I wish I could. But just maybe if more states opt for physician-assisted suicide some body else's loved one won't have to suffer in the future, as my wife did.

System Failure

      I'm not clairvoyant, but I can safely predict that the NRA, that national organization devoted to the coddling of mass shooters, will continue to fan the irrational (not to mention, totally delusional) fear of a government confiscation of guns and, even more importantly, continue with their unending and ever profitable quest to line the pockets of gun manufacturers unabated by either common-sense or decency.

      And most importantly, the NRA will continue to push the total fiction -- what former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Warren Burger called very rightly “one of the greatest pieces of fraud . . . on the American public by special interest groups” -- that the Second Amendment gives Americans some kind of absolute right to own a firearm. Despite the Heller and McDonald rulings, you can never delete the actual text of the Second Amendment and that bothersome phrase -- “well-regulated militia,” which was, of course, the whole point to having a right to bear arms.
      After each mass shooting – after Newtown, after Charleston, and after Roseburg – President Obama spoke eloquently that we must come to grips with the epidemic of mass shootings in our country. And undoubtedly after the next and the next and the next mass shooting at a mall, college, school, movie theater, or church, there will be even more poignant speeches, sermons, op-eds on the necessity to do something to stop this continuing blight on our country that leaves other countries wondering "what-the-hell?"

      But I can very safely predict that nothing much will change in America as far as gun control goes.
      In Australia gun control measures were passed after a mass shooting in 1996 that killed 35. Those measures led to a 59 percent decrease in homicides between 1995 and 2006. But laws like those have almost zero chance of being passed in the Home of the Brave where so far in 2015 we have already experienced 297 mass shootings according to shootingtracker.com.

      If the killing of 20 elementary-aged children in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012 didn't move Congress to act, do you really think the Roseburg Massacre of 9 adult innocents will make one whit of difference?

      How do I know that future mass shootings, which we all know will inevitably happen, will have no effect on the body politic? Because I know the dirty little secret of US politics: our government doesn't work.

      How do I know? The federal minimum wage in 2015 is $7.25 an hour. It hasn't budged for 6 years. If the minimum wage had kept up with inflation since 1968, it would be above $10 an hour. Raising the minimum wage up to $10.10 an hour would lift 50 million Americans out of poverty, according to a study by the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
      Look at the depleted highway fund. Toll roads, which I and most Americans hate, proliferate because the gas tax used to pay for highway construction hasn't been raised since 1993. The American Society of Civil Engineers graded our infrastructure as a D+ in 2013. Since we now have low interest rates, this would be the perfect time to borrow money to build infrastructure. It would create jobs now and kickstart our lagging economy.

      Infrastructure improvement is actually something government has traditionally done well. In 1956 the Congress passed the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, which led to our interstate highway system that helped to grow our nation's economy. Even so, I can safely predict that any action by the present Congress to improve our infrastructure will be minimal at best.
      Keeping guns from nut cases, helping low-wage workers, keeping our highways repaired, and our infrastructure modern -- in a functioning democracy none of these should really be political issues.
     But because our government can't do any of the above, it's a sure sign something is terribly wrong.

      If bills like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, that will end up benefiting mostly the wealthy, can be passed, despite strong opposition, but bills to help average Americans never see the light of day, my question is this: are we really anymore the government of the people, for the people, and by the people?

      The really sad thing is – all of us already know the answer to that question.

Farewell, Donald, We Hardly Knew Ye!

(Blogger's Note: This is the unedited version of my letter to The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, a once fairly decent, local newspaper.) (Another Blogger's Note: I had thoughts of deleting this post or, at least, changing the title, but now that it's late February of 2016 and the Donald is still the front runner. Mea culpa, I think it's a good reminder that we can all be wrong. Just a week or so ago, I watched some of the Republican debate before the South Carolina vote. Twenty minutes was my max. I will never understand how Trump supporters can listen to his incessant whining and bullying. My thought was that he'd finally jumped the shark, but, no, he won South Carolina. Incredible year. What we are watching is a monster created by years of ideologically-biased news coverage. His supporters, the great mis-informed mass, who facts cannot reach. It's a scary time. Who knows how it will turn out?)

     After reading the Star-Telegram's coverage of the Donald in Dallas, I admit to now being just in awe at Mr. Trump's oratorical skills. Forget that first Republican President's Gettysburg Address. Too old school. Too boring.

     Here's the Trumpman giving a summary of his platform: “We are going to have so many victories . . . and they are going to be great victories and we are going to have them all the time.”

      What do you think? His word choice just might make it to the third-grade level, of course, with absolutely no depth and no details. It's as if he designed his discourse especially for Fox News viewers.

     But, let me make this clear, I'm not against Donald Trump. As a liberal Democrat, I'm hoping, I'm praying he will be the Republican party nominee in 2016. Please, my Republican brethran, vote Trump.

      You will wake the sleeping giant of the Latino vote, and my side will win big. It'll be a great victory for a better, more inclusive America, and, to top it off, it'll make all the Trumpsters' heads spin. Literally.

 (As a bonus, here's, my response to an annoying, name-calling troll on the S-T website.)

    

     Let's see if I can break this down for you, buddy, and maybe do it without name-calling, which you might want to try doing because you only do name-calling when you don't have much of an argument.
     In 2004, 43 won because he won 44 percent of the Latino vote. Since then Republicans have not won such a high percentage of the Latino vote. That is an important reason the GOP did not win in 2008 and 2012. A CNN poll found that 82 percent of Hispanics view Trump unfavorably. 

     You may "think" that those who are truly informed (those extremely misinformed Fox "News" viewers, like yourself) back Trump, but that is wishful thinking. You cite no facts because you have none. Let me make this clear to you. Any of the Democratic candidates would beat Trump. The electoral college vote would be a landslide because the high number of Latinos in our most populated states. 

     It's not going to happen of course. Trump is already becoming yesterday's news. But hope springs eternal. Take care, and try using facts next time, buddy.

(And more . . .)

     To point out the obvious, again, you don't cite one single fact. Your method of argumentation is bullying, name-calling, and an inability to write anything coherent on the subject at hand. (A clue: the subject at hand is not Hillary, Benghazi, or CNN. It's whether Trump could garner enough of the Latino vote to win a national election.) 

     Obviously, he could not because of his high negatives. Trump's extreme xenophobia might excite the Republican base, but it makes him unelectable in a national election. The leaders of the Republican party already know this, so there is no way he will win the nomination. 

     Even though I wish he would win because, as I've already explained, Democrats would win such a big victory it would make Trump's supporters' heads spin. Quite literally, I hope. 
 

No Joke: The 84th Texas Legislature

        Any op-ed about the 84^th Texas Legislature should just really write itself – the setup, the joke, the punchline. It's a formula the late-great Molly Ivins mined for decades.

      A corrupt Texas pol proposes a bill for reasons so venal only a moron could possibly buy into it. The reader, now in the know, slaps his forehead, muttering, “Those idiot Texas legislators.” Then tilts his head back for a good, long chuckle. But in the end, who is this joke really on? You, me, us.

      And this legislative session, with its compendium of bad bills that sound like a horror movie film festival: “Open Carry,” “Open Carry Goes to College,” “The Vouchers That Ate Public Ed,” is just choke-full of punchlines.

      Take perhaps the worst bill of a very bad lot, Representative Phil King's HB40. This bill is explicitly designed to take power away from the people, so that energy companies have the inalienable right to frack where and how they want.

      Poor, poor Big Energy. Doesn't your heart just bleed? Those mean ol' Denton voters banned fracking, but Big Energy saw right away that kind of grassroots democracy had to be stopped and now.

      What if other cities and towns got in their heads that they had the right to ban fracking? Anyway, what's more important – the will of the people or Big Energy? In today's Grand Old Party, the answer is clear. Screw. the. people.

      But not only are our legislators making Texas safe for disposal wells and the earthquakes that will surely follow, but, dripping with the milk of human kindness, seek to protect that most endangered of all species, the plastic bag with – I love this – “The Shopping Bag Freedom Act.”

      Such blue cities as Austin, Dallas, and Laredo had the temerity to restrict the use of plastic bags. These restrictions, Republicans claim with a straight face, would lead to the Californication of the great state of Texas. Such a non-reason is beneath contempt, to be believed only by those poor wretched souls forever trapped in the right-wing echo chamber on the Planet Crazy.

      The upshot is, towns and cities, the governments closest to the people, must not be allowed to pass bills in their citizens' self-interest when the energy sector is even slightly inconvenienced because in Texas Big Energy trumps all.

      My own senator, Konni Burton has taken this a step further. She now covers her ears, saying, “Lalalalala,” whenever a lobbyist from a city is within earshot. But what makes Senator Burton even more extra-special is that, bless her heart, she is the walking, talking embodiment of the deep doo-doo we're now in.

      As I watched her “debate” Libby Willis back before the November elections, I couldn't help but wonder what exactly was the Republican vetting process for their candidates. During the debates, Burton came across as, to put it charitably, an intellectual lightweight and a political dilettante. In fact, I defy any one, regardless of political affiliation, to watch those debates and think the best person won the election.

     But what her ultimate triumph at the polls showed was that now Republican voters will vote for anybody with an R by their name, even an obvious incompetent like Burton. In what is pretty much a one-party state now, that's frightening as hell, and probably explains better than anything else why there are so many bad bills this session.

      To console ourselves, we might be tempted to snicker at the over-sized clown car that is the 2015 version of the Texas Lege, but the truth is, bad government isn't funny. It's deadly. Just ask those people in West. Taking money away from public schools, and giving Big Energy a blank check will make us all poorer and less healthy.

      And while historically Texas government has been conservative, this new breed of science-denying, evidence-ignoring, Koch-brothers-backed coterie is so, so much worse.

One political savvy friend wryly observed that because so few Texans bothered to vote we now have the government we deserve. But the truth is -- nobody deserves this. In fact, I believe all of us have an inalienable right to good government, one that works for the average person and the common good. But how we get there is up to us.

      What we shouldn't do is give up hope. Yes, Big Money, gerrymandering, a God-awful voter ID law, and apathy are going to be very hard to work against. But with jokers like Konni Burton and Jonathan Stickland gumming up the works, a revival of progressive populism cannot be far off.

Being Raked over Coals

     It might seem strange to enjoy being raked over the coals for my political writings, but I always count it an honor of sorts. Here's a link to a libertarian-leaning lawyer's blog post that zeroed in on my most recent piece in The FW Weekly. http://right-winggenius.blogspot.com/2014/12/contrarian-view-low-voter-turnout-isnt.html
     Interesting stuff. Of course, nothing will ever compare (knock on wood) with the shellacking I got on the Free Republic site after my piece in the FW Star-Telegram about how undemocratic our Constitution is. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/921320/posts?page=55 Good times!
 
    Below is my reply to Adam Arrington:

Mr. Arrington,

Thank you for reading my piece in the FW Weekly. I appreciate any and all feedback. And I suppose it's sort of an honor to be raked over the coals, whether those coals are red-hot or day-old cold.  We obviously disagree, but I commend you, for the most part, for your tone, which is less personal invective than substantive disagreements. So let's get to that . . .

  

I'm always more than a little surprised how any one who looks at the facts objectively can defend voter suppression, regardless of their political persuasion. The voter ID laws that have proliferated across the country in the past few years originally came from ALEC, a right-wing group. The bills ostensibly address an issue -- in-person voter impersonation --  that is extremely rare. The true purpose is obvious: to suppress voters who would vote for Democrats, and it's worked remarkably well.

The GAO released a report in September of this year that the voter ID laws in Kansas and Tennessee  suppressed the vote by about 2%, correlating pretty closely to earlier estimates from statistician Nate Silver. I think conservative Judge Richard A. Posner has put it best: "There is only one motivation for imposing burdens on voting that are ostensibly designed to discourage voter-impersonation fraud,and that is to discourage voting by persons likely to vote against the party responsible for imposing the burdens." As he points out, the laws are "highly correlated with a state's having a Republican governor and Republican control of the legislature and appear to be aimed at limiting voting by minorities, particularly blacks." And  your link about the noncitizens voting is unconvincing, as well. To say that something is possible, a high percentage of noncitizens voting, is not to prove anything, really.

Politics ain't beanbag, and Republicans play for keeps. I, for one, admire them for that.That said, I don't think voting should be a partisan issue.

I also can not abide your idea, as attractive as I'm sure it is to you, that Republicans are smarter, more attractive, and have straighter teeth than the dim-witted Democrats. I don't think either party can honestly claim a monopoly or near-monopoly on misinformed voters. Most people are busy with their lives, which, for most people, includes kids, work, long commutes, money-problems of one sort or another, and hanging on to what sanity they were born with. In as depoliticized a society as ours it's little wonder that most people don't follow what passes for political discourse in this country. One side thinking the other side are idiots is normal, I suppose, but both sides have their share of ill-informed voters pulling the lever for them.

In 2016, I think it somewhat likely that the country will elect a Republican President. If history is our guide, then Republicans will lose in the midterms of 2018. I predict that you will not think those voters are la creme de la creme, as you purport to believe now.

Mr. Arrington, I count it an honor that you took the time to attack my work. I always tell everyone that the writing I've done for the Weekly has kept me out of the bars -- well, at least for the most part. Here's hoping it did the same for you. And I'm glad it provided you some raw material to stake out and defend your own political positions.

Take care.

Ken Wheatcroft-Pardue